In 1983, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published the first edition of Augustine’s Laws by Norman R. Augustine , then president and chief operating officer of Martin Marietta Corporation . The book is a humorous, but insightful look at the problems of managing a large corporation. The book is written from the viewpoint of managing a large aerospace corporation with large government contracts but has larger implications. A very satirical read with pseudo-technical commentary and charts, written in 1983. Most of the laws are even more applicable today.
Norman Augustine was an aerospace businessman before his retirement. He served as President and CEO of Lockheed Martin and many will remember him most for his book Augustine Laws.
Here are few famous laws of the 52 laws described in his book:
Law Number V- One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output.
Law Number XV- The last 10 percent of performance generates one-third of the cost and two-thirds of the problems.
Law Number XLVIII- The more time you spend talking about what you have been doing, the less time you have to spend doing what you have been talking about. Eventually, you spend more and more time talking about less and less until finally, you spend all your time talking about nothing.
His most cited law would be Law Number XVI , which shows that defense contracting budgets grow linearly but the unit cost of a new military aircraft grows exponentially. This law led to his humorous conclusion about sharing planes.
Law Number XVI- In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. This aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy 3-1/2 days each per week except for leap year when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day.
(source :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustine%27s_laws#/media/File:Augustine's_law.svg)
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