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Cut corners on trivial things
Head straight for it
They don't waste time on theory and complexity. They recognize what's important and head straight for it, because action generates information.
A corner worth cutting
Picture a class where a friend holds every previous test and the teacher reuses all the questions. Memorizing those answers cuts a corner, but the prize is an arbitrary grade from an arbitrary person on an arbitrary paper, so nothing important is lost.
A corner worth keeping
A corner cut on a mission-critical item is a different matter, as with whether a blood test is accurate. Efficiency gets different weight at different levels: the whole system matters more than any one subsystem, and the best founders know which is which.
Why does action generate information?
Jeff Bezos's 2015 letter to Amazon shareholders divided decisions into two kinds. One-way doors are nearly irreversible and deserve slow, careful study. Two-way doors can be walked back, and he wrote that they should be made quickly by individuals or small groups. Eric Ries's 2011 book The Lean Startup built a method on the same logic, treating each quick experiment as a way to learn.
Why does the whole system outrank its parts?
Eliyahu Goldratt's 1984 novel The Goal introduced the theory of constraints. It holds that a system's output is limited by its single tightest bottleneck, so improving any other part leaves the total unchanged. Polishing a part that is not the constraint takes effort without raising output. Goldratt developed the idea in manufacturing, where he applied it to factory production lines.
How do reused tests distort grades?
When a grade becomes the goal, students can chase the grade directly, for instance by memorizing answers from reused exams. British economist Charles Goodhart made a related point about monetary policy in 1975. Anthropologist Marilyn Strathern later phrased it as a measure ceasing to be a good measure once it becomes a target, and the saying is now known as Goodhart's law. Her wording appeared in a 1997 paper on audit culture in British universities.
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