Ben Quayle Quotes

When I became director of CIA, it was just clear to me intuitively, without a whole lot of science behind it, that we had expanded rapidly and inefficiently. So I arbitrarily picked a number, 10 percent, and I said over the next 12 months, we are going to reduce our reliance on contractors by 10 percent.

Managers today have to do more with less, and get better results from limited resources, more than ever before.

Heavy lifting doesn't need to be heavy spending if we do the job right.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.

I went through all my electric bills, the water bills, the phone bills, elevator contracts, and I found enough wasteful spending without reducing any programs anywhere, without reducing any services, I found enough wasteful spending to pay my entire salary for three years.

Defense leaders should be searching for ways to reform out-of-date procurement processes, to collapse layers of Pentagon bureaucracy, and to restrain the growth in personnel and benefits costs. A critical first step in that process should be to conduct a full Pentagon audit to determine how DOD spends taxpayer dollars.

Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

Sometimes it's more difficult to achieve a 10% cost reduction than it is to tell people they have to achieve 50%. Small incremental steps block your view of doing something fundamentally different.

That is what we know how to do better than anyone else: We know how to maximize value for our projects. If the government would like to hire my services to maximize value for their stake, they should approach me. No problem.

We are trying to make up these other elements by gaining cost efficiencies through our reengineering process and through overt fund-raising activities to better support graduate education.

I got to get the right people in the right job. Because a lot of costs can be taken out in the context of your administration without the legislature. For example, using technology to do more with less. Using technology to fight fraud. Reorganizing and streamlining can be done within the context of the administration.

The only way to make budget cuts is to bring down force structure.

There are limits to what reorganization and reform can do.

The way to cut the military budget is to go to the commanding officer of each military facility and tell him he will get another star if he cuts his budget, and we will be trampled in the stampede to save money.

The consolidation that we started in 2009 was clearly the requirement of that time.

It is time to cut out the mountains of waste and inefficiency and duplication in the federal government.

Business isn't complicated; we complicate business.

If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask. Change it. Think about dollars, think about your soldiers' time, think about efficiency.

I love the U.S. military. I want them to be the most effective and the most cost-effective and I think there is so much spending and so much bloat and so much bureaucracy that it actually hinders them from having a lot of the mission accomplishments that they should.

The bottom line is this: in an era of mounting fiscal challenges and competing demands, we must actively seek ways to free up time, money, and manpower to invest back into our top priorities.

Engineering is the art of managing scarcity - it's easy to design and build a massive bridge that will last forever if cost is not an issue. Similarly, to build a new company, you must manage scarce resources.

Making everything more efficient should make everybody happier.

We want to make sure the military gets it right and understands that if they're going to have less money, they're going to have to spend it a lot more smartly.

In my experience, what is often missing between intent and action is the knowledge and the means to actually change the way we do business or make consumer decisions.