investiledysfunction

A good friend of mine runs a large distribution company, and they’re approaching that stage of going from a mid-market company to large-market company.  And with this growth comes some fun moments that he and I joke about.  Two recent gems he mentioned to me included:

• The company was paying interns overtime so they could analyze their overtime expense
• A mass meeting tomorrow to let people know that they’re no longer going to have mass meetings in favor of smaller ones

While this might make you think of Michael Scott of The Office, the interesting thing in this case is that unlike most companies, my friend’s company is doing things to understand and ultimately reduce unproductive complexity.  In the vast majority of instances, things like meetings or overtime expense become part of corporate culture with little questioning as they become considered “business as usual”.  When you hear or think those three little terms, you know there may be a problem.

Of course, just having a meeting or analyzing overtime isn’t enough.  Ultimately, you’ll have to take steps to improve the situation.  But diagnosing the problem is important, of course, before prescribing a solution.

I’ll leave you with one of Michael Scott’s greatest quotes - “You may look around and see two groups here; white collar, blue collar. But I don’t see it that way, and you know why not? Because I am collar-blind.”

Given the vast amounts of unproductive complexity (UC) that resides within organizations, it is amazing how prone we are to believing silver-bullet strategies will transform the company and miraculously grow revenues, shareholder returns, profits, customer and employee satisfaction. 

When I talk about unproductive complexity, I’m talking about the absurd matrixed organization structures, transfer pricing issues, overly-detailed budget processes, steering committees, infighting due to silos, bizarre short-term oriented incentive structures and other ridiculous processes and practices organizations adopt.  Managers would have you believe that this complexity is an unfortunate consequence of being big and global or multinational, and to some extent, that is true.  But unproductive complexity is often a result of territorial and suboptimal behavior.  It’s end result is slow and often poor decision-making.  Unproductive complexity is the enemy of innovation.  It is good, however, at creating job security for a host of mediocre and incompetent people who can sneak by while they shuffle papers from left to right and churn out PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets.  And given their accomplices in the leadership ranks, this activity over accomplishment method becomes acceptable.  If you want to change organizational performance, focus on stamping out unproductive complexity.  This should be the focus on reengineering efforts - not knee jerk cost cutting and layoffs.

So with that rant about unproductive complexity out of the way, let me get back to the subject I wanted cover.  Given this UC, it perhaps makes sense that leaders are drawn to consultant, software, academic elixirs that are simple.  With all the day to day b.s. they have to put up with, it’s probably comforting to think that if they just do “this one great thing”, they’ll have changed company performance and arrived.  There is probably some psychological basis so I’ll just assume that there is some school of psychology that says “when people are overwhelmed, they take comfort in something that doesn’t overwhelm them.”

And as a result, consultants, academics and many software vendors who’ve realized this bring elixirs and other alchemy-in-a-box solutions to management and with great success, they sell them and make lots of money.  In fact, entire industries emerge around some of these practices.  This enables the leaders to not think too hard for a bit because the solution is just right in front of them.  It also often serves the dual purpose of making the leader seem bold, visionary, strategic, etc.  These are all nice appelations that we like.

Here are some of my favorite elixirs that appear to be hot these days.  Some actually have value but given everyone is hanging out their shingle and professing expertise in many of these areas, I worry that organizations will end up with a whole lot of nothing after investing in these efforts with these dubious experts.  

Here is my list which I hope to revisit over time and get input on.  The top elixirs, hot topics, etc are: business intelligence, IT portfolio management, innovation (always hot), corporate social responsibility, anything green, web2.0, social networking.