Book Review: Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter

TL;dr - I only post reviews of excellent books, this is an excellent book, click the link below and improve your understanding of How We Make Things Better (all the things).

The blurb that led me to order this books was, “Efficiency is the engine of civilization. But where do improvements in production efficiency come from? In The Origins of Efficiency, Brian Potter argues that improving production efficiency—finding ways to produce goods and services in less time, with less labor, using fewer resources—is the force behind some of the most consequential changes in human history.”

Since I am a hardcore manufacturing and engineering geek AND a history buff, how could I resist.

Now that I’ve read it, my first abiding thought is that this should be a required course for every student in engineering to take along with every student in business in the same classroom. I’ve got a degree in engineering (BS) and a degree in business (MS, not MBA - we studied maths and law, not PowerPoint), and I wish this had been available in the early ‘90s.

A thread that weaves through the book is that efficiency is the normal outcome of human endeavors to improve their technical products, be that flint knapping or titanium refining. The book is rife with examples, enough references to keep you reading for a decade, and a lot of helpful classifications of ways to increase efficiency of processes. Chapters 2 through 5 drill down on the various ways in which improvements are made; new processes, reducing input costs, production rates and economies of scale, and removing steps. All of which seems obvious, but Potter organizes these in ways that are thought provoking with attention to how there are tradeoffs, limits to improvement, general rules of thumb, and ways that changes are not always the improvements they are intended to be.

Chapter 6 is where I had to slow down. This starts with an excellent explanation of how small statistical variations in production steps, even if they are “balanced”, inevitably lead to growing queues of WIP. I am a consultant in design and manufacturing for tricky stuff like medical implants, and often feel like I am speaking Sanskrit when trying to explain to people with a “C” in their title how actual real manufacturing is messy and requires constant attention if you want to get real efficiency - the opening example would be a fantastic five slide explainer titled “How Simple Gets Complicated Fast".

Potter dives into a lot of historical examples with delightful detail, illustrating how some very old technologies (smelting, for example) improved slowly even in the absence of any scientific understanding of the physics or chemistry, and then how in the early modern era the pace accelerated dramatically. In a bit of understatement, “Over time, of course, knowledge of production processes, as well as the methods used to acquire such knowledge, became much more robust. Around the 18th and 19th centuries, producers gradually began to deliberately experiment with their processes to understand the relationships between different variable and how they could be manipulated.” (pg. 162)

I hope I’ve shared enough to interest you in Potter’s most excellent book, and strongly suggest that you invest the time if you have any interest in the history of technology development, manufacturing, design, or even why it took so long to get good at steel.