Corporate Efficiency

Seeing as I'm off on a "New Leaders' Program" for a couple of days, I thought I'd make this week's theme about leadership. Today's topic: efficiency. Carmine Coyote over at Slow Leadership has this to say (which I whole-bodidly agree with) about the usual way organizations approach to inefficiency:

"Take cutting costs. The conventional approach is childishly simple: the biggest bill in most companies is the wage bill—therefore cutting people (or wages or both) is the easiest way to reduce costs, quickly and “efficiently.”

Wrong. Removing waste in the form of unnecessary jobs makes sense. But most of those people are there because they are the organization; they make, deliver, service, support or invent what the organization does. Firing them is like deciding to cut off your left hand because you’re right-handed and do things better with the other one. Sure, you could manage with one hand, but you have two because you need two to function best...."