My teacher asked that we think a bit about the differences between efficiency and effectiveness before our class tomorrow.
I looked them up and spotted the easy difference, but I feel there's a lot more to it.

Efficiency: Performing a task in the best manner, spending the least amount of time and resources.
Effectiveness: Performing a task in general. (Not best manner, just works.)

Let me know what I'm missing in general and in detail.

i think your teacher wants you to think about which one is better in different situations and what the tradeoff is

for example, i'm pretty efficient when it comes to school. i know how to spend very little time studying to get a high B / low A. but if i decreased my efficiency and increased my effectiveness (eg: study 3-4x as much) then i could get a high A. but the opportunity cost of losing so much time is too high, so i dont bother.

/edit

or a company could let their employees complete a project for them in 4 weeks. maybe it's possible to hire contractors on a temporary basis who are more skilled and can get the project complete in 3 weeks. but is it worth the cost? you'd have to spend more time finding the contractors and they'll charge you more per hour. you can't really let the employees go so you're still paying for their benefits and such.

This post was edited by carteblanche on Sep 10 2013 08:33pm

Wow, that actually helped a lot. Thank you so much. More insight would also be helpful if possible.

Your teacher will be looking for this answer: the difference is that one is meant for specialization while the other is for mass production. You can only have one and not the other. If you are efficient you can not be effective. Effective is costly but demanded while efficient is cheap and required. I know this being a macro pa