The errors of efficiency
“This article argues that efficient doesn’t necessarily mean effective. It argues that more productive doesn’t necessarily mean more powerful. And it argues that being mass, ignored and expensive are not points of weakness but, in fact, points of strength.”
(This article is about advertising, but the point can be generalized and seen everywhere. Here are a few thoughts I had around the broader idea.
A lot of organizations focus on efficiency over effectiveness rather than being effectively efficient. It doesn’t matter how efficient you are if you are not effective.
Often when we decide what’s efficient, we do so on too short of a timeline. What’s efficient in the short term is often increasingly fragile.
The costs of efficiency are everywhere — just look at buying a car today. The ‘just in time’ inventory system of the manufacturers had only a few days of key parts in it. Of course, this is what every business school teaches. When supply chains got disrupted, factories were temporarily shuttered. All because a bigger buffer of these parts would show up on the balance sheet and look, at least temporarily, ‘inefficient.’
The world is less predictable than we think. Random events happen with unpredictable results. The way to weather these is to have margins of safety, shock absorbers, and slack — in other words, inefficiency.
Inevitably, people will consider the latest disruption a fluke and no one will learn the lesson: When you remove the shock absorbers, you get the shocks. Don’t win the moment at the expense of the decade.)
★ “The shortest distance between two points is reliably a straight line. If your dreams are apparent to you, pursue them. Creating optionality and buying lottery tickets are not way stations on the road to pursuing your dreamy outcomes. They are dangerous diversions that will change you.”
— The Trouble with Optionality
Πηγή: fs.blog
