A Book with Legs Brian Potter - The Origins of Efficiency
Nov 3, 2025
In this engaging conversation, Brian Potter, a structural engineer and author of The Origins of Efficiency, delves into the transformative power of efficiency in production. He describes how improved penicillin production revolutionized healthcare and outlines five key factors driving production efficiency. The discussion also touches on the historical stagnation of technology, the challenges with adopting new processes, and the intriguing Jevons Paradox. Potter provides insights into why promising technologies fail and shares thoughts on the future of housing and construction.
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Factory Move Alone Isn't A Cure
- Brian Potter investigated why moving processes into factories alone often fails to create lasting efficiency gains.
- He concluded understanding specific production interventions is required to make processes truly cheaper and scalable.
Penicillin’s Scale Changed Medicine
- Penicillin was discovered by Fleming but scarce and too costly to treat patients at first.
- A US crash program found strains and scaling methods that cut treatment cost from thousands to pennies and saved millions of lives.
Five Levers To Improve Any Process
- Efficiency improvements cluster into five intervention types: new technology, cheaper inputs, scale, reduced variability, and fewer buffers.
- Cutting unnecessary process steps is a sixth high-impact lever for lowering costs.
