Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman Ralph Augustine

Augustine’s line lands because it flips a lazy assumption: that incompetence is cheap. In the world he’s talking about - complex engineering, defense contracting, aerospace - unreliability isn’t the natural baseline. “Good enough” reliability often arrives as a byproduct of standards, testing regimes, quality control, and hard-won institutional habits. To make something meaningfully worse, you can’t just stop caring; you have to fight the system.

That’s the joke with teeth: high unreliability is a premium product. The subtext is bureaucratic and industrial: if you want a machine that fails predictably, you need specialized parts, perverse incentives, and elaborate processes to bypass the safeguards designed to prevent exactly that. The absurdity maps neatly onto large organizations where layers of review, documentation, and compliance can make even bad outcomes labor-intensive. Dysfunction becomes a kind of craftsmanship.

The “factor of ten” framing is classic Augustine: a mock-precise numerical law that mimics the confident arithmetic of project planning. It’s satire disguised as managerial clarity. By quantifying degradation, he ridicules the way institutions pretend that anything - cost, performance, failure - can be cleanly dialed up or down with spreadsheets. The context is a culture of big programs where overruns and underperformance aren’t anomalies but recurring genres. The intent isn’t merely to sneer; it’s to warn: when systems get large enough, they can make failure not only possible, but exquisitely expensive.