Customer Reviews

Augustine's Laws, Sixth Edition

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I would not have ever expected to find myself laughing out loud, nor even smiling often while reading a book that discusses government projects and corporations who contract them. Norman Augustine provides a clear and critical insight into the corporate-government affairs world with just enough graphs and charts to make it comprehensible yet not overbearing. I found it as light reading - which is a virtue on it's own when reading about such complex a subject.

Norm Augustine has captured the government defense aerospace industry "sprawling on a pin" for dissection. In one particularly humorous bit he points out that just when the aerospace industry's trend to more and more expensive combat aircraft looked like it might be stalled since adding weight is anathema to aircraft -- along came something expensive and weightless to fill the gap -- software! This is one terrific book! Just the figure showing there is no correlation between what executives are paid and the performance of their companies is worth the price of admission.

Accurate, Funny, and informative. This book captures the real (and not so real) world of government and other large projects spot on. Having been on both sides (NASA and contractor), there be truth in this wit. Enjoy. To be appreciated, best read while sitting on a $600 toilet seat.

I have bought this book by the case to give to colleagues in both aerospace and other industries. I highly recommend it for its insights and perspectives although time has passed and it would be great if someone could bring it up to date.

"Augustine's Laws" should be required reading for everyone going into engineering or business school. This book taught me more about project management and the problems therein than the required text for my graduate-level course in CU's Aerospace Engineering department.

I was reading the reviews of this book on its back cover, and one in particular stands out: Scott Adams, creator of "Dilbert," said, "This is the only book that ever made me mutter, 'we're all doomed,' while laughing at the same time." I am of the same sentiment. I just shake my head with each story that Augustine tells, muttering, "Oh my God, oh my God, we're all screwed." One could probably summarize the 52 laws into a single one: Don't try anything because nothing will work. I am hysterical at the wittiness of this book.

The best bits in this book are the plots he makes. Yes, the plots. Engineers love well-titled, cleverly-built, wonderfully intuitive plots. Augustine delivers. Some examples: CEO Rank in Wages vs. Company Rank in Reports (no correlation); Percent of Total Output vs. Percent of Total Contributors (nearly perfectly linear on a log-log scale); GNP, Defense Budget, and Aircraft Unit Cost vs. Time (all nearly linear on a semi-log-y scale, with the Aircraft Unit Cost predicted to intersect the Defense Budget by the year 2050); Actual "Time-to-Go" versus Predicted "Time-to-Go" (nearly perfectly linear, with a best-fit line having a slope of something very close to the quantity of 1+1/pi = 1.3); and on and on and on.

Some of my favorites quotes, reduced in quantity to prevent being a total spoiler:

"... The great predominance of output is produced by a disproportionately small segment of the participants -- with the same result seeming to apply nearly within a pencil-width whether one is addressing authors, pilots, engineers, policemen, or football players. Unfortunately, it also seems to apply to arrests by the Washington, D.C. police force and beer consumption."

"The first fifty-six minutes of a meeting (all meetings require one hour) are, in fact, relatively innocuous and pass with little being accomplished other than the presentation of routine and generally peripheral background material. It is during the remaining four minutes, however, that The Bombshell will invariably be dropped squarely on the center of the table. For example, the first fifty-six minutes will be devoted to heated debate among all participants as to the color the sign in front of the new oil refinery should be painted. Only during the final four minutes will it gradually emerge that earlier that morning the plant had been destroyed in an explosion."

"Law Number XV: The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems."

"Under one recent administration it was found that the federal government possessed no fewer than 1175 formal external advisory committees. A review of the utility of these committees (by a committee) led to the conclusion that all but sixteen committees were indispensable and should therefore be perpetuated."

"In the commercial world, once approved, it borders on the ludicrous that members of the firm in question would continue to seek to undermine the decision that had been made. In contrast, this is not only the norm for government programs but it is practiced quite openly and with great vigor. It sometimes appease in the latter case that program participants and fund-providers may have rather different things in mind they embrace the seemingly mutual objective of overseeing a project's execution."

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