He could have assigned this part of the job to another, but it was not in his conception of his duties to do so. The shorter the chain, the less chance for a broken link.

The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link.

A good corroborating chain, if they fail in the last link, the whole will fall to the ground.

Sometimes when you mend a chain, the place where you fix it is strongest of all... Never was a chain that couldn't be broken. Sometimes its even a good idea.

Sometimes when you mend a chain, the place where you fix it is strongest of all... Never was a chain that couldn't be broken. Sometimes it’s even a good idea.

Since the strength of the chain is determined by the weakest link, then the first step to improve an organization must be to identify the weakest link.

A good rule of thumb for a lot of things in life is that everything that can break will eventually break. So if many things rely on one thing working, and that thing breaks, you are counting the days to catastrophe. That’s a single point of failure.

If we could only just see our lives as links in the chain of life, and see as our first responsibility to get that next link in the chain safely to the future

Where, one step broken, the great scale’s destroyed: From Nature’s chain whatever link you strike, Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.

You don’t have to be overwhelmed by essential projects. Often, when you name the first obvious step, you avoid spending too much mental energy thinking about the fifth, seventh, or twenty-third steps. It doesn’t matter if your project involves ten steps or a thousand. When you adopt this strategy, all you have to focus on is the very first step.

But we cannot do it all at once; it is a sequence. An unfolding process. We can only control the end by making a choice at each step.

For this purpose it is necessary to keep in sharp focus a fact of which often we are not aware: we are at all times a connecting link, one of many links, in a chain reaction of related events. Each of us is the product of many chains: the evolutionary chain, the racial chain, the genetic chain, the environmental chain, and many others. The immense mass of events of which we are alternately the cause and the effect surpasses the human imagination.

You have been told that, even like a chain, you are as weak as your weakest link.
This is but half the truth.
You are also as strong as your strongest link.
To measure you by your smallest deed is to reckon the power of the ocean
by the frailty of its foam.
To judge you by your failures is to cast blame upon the seasons for their inconstancy.

It's going to fail your project if you take the easy bits first, deliberately. Because you can't solve the difficult bit, your project will fail late than failing early and your company will lose lots of money.