Top 40 Tom DeMarco Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t control what you can’t measure.”

— Tom DeMarco

Featured in: IT Quotes, Efficiency Quotes

2. “The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.”

— Tom DeMarco

3. “Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That’s what management is all about.”

— Tom DeMarco

4. “Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.”

— Tom DeMarco

5. “The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.”

— Tom DeMarco

6. “First law of Bad Management: If something isn’t working, do more of it.”

— Tom DeMarco

7. “Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.”

— Tom DeMarco

8. “There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.”

— Tom DeMarco

9. “Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.”

— Tom DeMarco

10. “Risk management is not the same as worrying about your project.”

— Tom DeMarco

11. “The manager’s function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.”

— Tom DeMarco

12. “Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That’s why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.”

— Tom DeMarco

13. “Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.”

— Tom DeMarco

14. “When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.”

— Tom DeMarco

15. “Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.”

— Tom DeMarco

16. “The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.”

— Tom DeMarco

17. “Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.”

— Tom DeMarco

18. “When companies can’t invent, it’s usually because their people are too damn busy.”

— Tom DeMarco

19. “If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.”

— Tom DeMarco

20. “If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, “The light is better there.””

— Tom DeMarco

21. “It’s possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That’s what happens when you drive out slack.”

— Tom DeMarco

22. “On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.”

— Tom DeMarco

23. “In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive, ” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase – understood implicitly by all involved – for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.”

— Tom DeMarco

24. “Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.”

— Tom DeMarco

25. “The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I’d had this wonderful reference book years ago.”

— Tom DeMarco

26. “Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.”

— Tom DeMarco

27. “The more you focus on control, the more likely you’re working on a project that’s striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.”

— Tom DeMarco

28. “The business we’re in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers’ abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.”

— Tom DeMarco

29. “Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they’re secretly threatened by the whole concept.”

— Tom DeMarco

30. “The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn’t own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn’t ever read one.”

— Tom DeMarco

31. “When the office environment is frustrating enough, people look for a place to hide out. They book the conference rooms or head for the library or wander off for coffee and just don’t come back. No, they are not meeting for secret romance or plotting political coups; they are hiding out to work. The good news here is that your people really do need to feel the accomplishment of work completed. They will go to great extremes to make that happen.”

— Tom DeMarco

32. “Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.”

— Tom DeMarco

33. “What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.”

— Tom DeMarco

34. “Learning is limited by an organization’s ability to keep its people.”

— Tom DeMarco

35. “Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.”

— Tom DeMarco

36. “You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.”

— Tom DeMarco

37. “As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.”

— Tom DeMarco

38. “Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.”

— Tom DeMarco

39. “Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.”

— Tom DeMarco

40. “What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty.”

— Tom DeMarco