Sam Graves 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.

I think one key part of doing more with less is to be more strategic, to realize what the objectives you're truly trying to accomplish are and then to drive with greater focus towards those objectives.

Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually.

You know, in a workplace, when you shrink the size of a workforce, there is pain there. But there is no question: we have a government that we can no longer afford. That is the cold, hard fact. So we have to make this more efficient. We have to sunset programs that no longer work. We have to eliminate waste and fraud. We must do this.

We're reviewing everything to see how we can do it better, faster, and more efficiently.

Congress, the press, and the bureaucracy too often focus on how much money or effort is spent, rather than whether the money or effort actually achieves the announced goal.

The smaller the function, the greater the management.

The time I save setting up and cleaning up probably balances out by the time I spend on output.

Every government program needs to be more efficient. Instead of pointing out how other programs can tighten their belts, every program administrator must look inward to save money.

The more you eliminate the inefficient use of information, the better it is for productivity.

Don't reinvent the wheel, just realign it.

Obviously, the highest type of efficiency is that which can utilize existing material to the best advantage.

Most of the model consolidation we've done is behind us. There will be some fine tuning.

There can be economy only where there is efficiency.

We also have to ask if we focusing on the most important priorities.

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.

It's not about working harder; it's about working the system.

All of us are going to have to find ways to do things more efficiently, find ways to get our costs more in line, and do it in a time of higher regulatory and environmental standards.

There are two ways to reduce expenditures. There is the intelligent way ... going through each department and questioning each program. Then there is the stupid way: announcing how much you will cut and getting each department to cut that amount. I favor the stupid way.

Spending a few hundred million dollars more a year on evaluations could save tens of billions of dollars by teaching us which programs work and generating lessons to improve programs that don’t

There are limits to what reorganization and reform can do.

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

We will reinvent productivity to empower every person and every organization on the planet to do more and achieve more.

A boss is all about good business, so start with everything that you can control and you can turn up that costs you nothing, then lay all the knobs out, look at all the controls, all the remotes, and just turn them all up. It don't cost you nothing.

I think there are several departments we could completely get rid of, and we wouldn't miss it.