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Don’t Save Your Own Time at the Expense of Others Time

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Sometimes we take shortcuts to save ourselves time, but which cost others a lot of time because of the sub-par work product our time-saving shortcuts created. This is not an overall savings of time, but a wasting of time. Hence, though it seems efficient, it is not. We must think deeper.

Garr Reynolds illustrates this very well in his excellent book Presentation Zen. Though his specific example pertains to presentations, the principle applies to anything you do:

I can save time on the front end, but I may waste more time for others on the back end. For example, if I give a completely worthless one-hour death-by-PowerPoint presentation to an audience of 200, that equals 200 hours of wasted time.

But if I instead put in the time, say, 25-30 hours or more of planning and designing the message, and the media, then I can give the world 200 hours of worthwhile, memorable experience.

Software companies advertise time-saving features, which may help us believe we have saved time to complete a task such as preparing a presentation and “simplified” our workday. But if time is not saved for the audience — if the audience wants its time because we didn’t prepare well, design the visuals well, or perform well — then what does it matter that we saved one hour in preparing our slides?

Doing things in less time sometimes does indeed feel simpler, but if it results in wasted time and wasted opportunities later, it is hardly simple.

 

Does God Care About Efficiency?

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Much (but not all!) productivity literature places way too much focus on efficiency. The default thinking of many seems to be that one of our main goals in any task should be to get it done as quickly as possible with as little waste as possible.

This works well with machines. But it is problematic when it comes to people, because prioritizing efficiency when humans are involved often results in diminishing beauty, quality, and discovery. (For one example, see Patrick Lencioni’s great article “The Enemy of Innovation and Creativity” which is, you guessed it, efficiency.) Efficiency has its place, but it is secondary to effectiveness and quality.

This productivity principle relates to apologetics, or the defense of the faith. Sometimes skeptics look at the universe and the way God created things and critique it on the basis that it’s not maximally efficient.

These thinkers are guilty of over-prioritizing efficiency. For God is far more like an artist than an engineer.

I love how William Lane Craig puts this at his site Reasonable Faith, in response to the question “Does the Vastness of the Universe Support Naturalism?“:

Sometimes people complain that a vast cosmos is a waste of space and so would impugn God’s efficiency as a Creator and Designer. But here I’m persuaded by Thomas Morris’ point that efficiency is a value only for someone who has limited time and/or resources, a condition which is just inapplicable to God.

That’s why I think that those pressing the efficiency objection are just wrong in thinking of God in terms of an engineer marshaling his resources rather than as an artist, who enjoys splashing His cosmic canvas with dazzling colors and creations.

I am in awe as I look at the galactic and cosmic structures photographed by the Hubble telescope. The vastness and beauty of the universe speak to me of God’s majestic greatness and His marvelous condescension in loving and caring about us.

As with God, so also with us. Care about efficiency. But care about beauty and service most of all.

 

Go Slow to Go Fast

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From Executive Intelligence, quoting Irene Rosenfeld, former CEO of Frito-Lay:

Because we know speed is of the essence, too often we immediately start moving without first taking the time to think about what we’re trying to accomplish.

There are hundreds of stories about this. Everyone is trying to act quickly, but too often they run out to solve a problem without fully understanding what problem they are trying to solve. This creates a lot of organizational angst which slows things down and leads to all sorts of issues regarding job satisfaction and work-life balance.

And the Greatest Enemy of Creativity and Innovation Is…

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Efficiency.

Patrick Lencioni makes the case very well in his article, The Enemy of Creativity and Innovation. Here’s a great part:

I’ve become convinced that the only way to be really creative and innovative in life is to be joyfully inefficient….

Efficiency requires that we subdue our passion and allow it to be constrained by principles of logic and convention. Innovation and creativity require us to toss aside logic and convention, even without the near-term promise of a payoff. Embracing both at the same time seems to me to be a recipe for stress, dissonance and mediocrity, and yet, that is exactly what so many organizations—or better yet—leaders, do.

They exhort their employees to utilize their resources wisely and to avoid waste and redundancy, which makes perfect sense. They also exhort them to be ever-vigilant about finding new and better products or processes, which also makes sense. And yet, combining these two perfectly sensible exhortations makes no sense at all, and only encourages rational, responsible people to find a middle ground, something that is decidedly neither efficient nor innovative.

This is why I don’t talk about efficiency a ton. It matters and has its place. But my goal is effectiveness, and often times the greatest path to effectiveness is quite inefficient.

More on this in my book.

The Virtue of Inefficiency?

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Sometimes, the quest for efficiency is a red herring. Consider the example of the first light bulb, described in The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy:

Thomas Edison’s first light bulb wasn’t at all efficient. One 1905 observer complained that “the incandescent lamp is an extremely poor vehicle for converting electric energy into light energy, since only about 4 percent of the energy supplied to the lamp is converted into light energy, the remaining 96 percent being converted into heat energy.” And the power plant that Edison built to light his bulb didn’t convert even 10 percent of its heat into electricity.

But the end-to-end losses of over 99 percent seemed worthwhile to produce such a wonderfully clean, compact, cool, and safe source of light. Efficiency was beside the point. As Jill Jonnes recounts in Empires of Light, gas and oil lamps didn’t stand a chance against such a superior alternative.

Sometimes a concern for efficiency undercuts what really matters. To have said “96 percent of the energy that goes into the light bulb produces heat, not light, so let’s get rid of this thing” would have missed the most important thing: we have light. And this is way better than oil lamps.

It’s often the same way in organizations. An organization often starts out vibrant and energetic and full life. Things are getting done, and people love what they are doing.

But then someone says “we need to get this organized better.” So they bring in the efficient organizers, and the life and spirit of the organization is efficencized right out of it.

Of course, organizing is a good thing. The problem is in treating it as the main thing. Or, which is the same thing, sacrificing the things that create the life and spirit of the organization to the perceived need to “have control” and be efficient.

Don’t be an efficient organizer  — someone who cares about cost-cutting and efficiency as though they are more important than the mission and goals of the organization. Put the mission first. Be efficient where you can, but don’t let that become the point.

Reducing Costs Does Not Always Increase Profits

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To be blunt, taking measures at cost reduction is often a naive way of trying to increase profits. It’s not that there’s no place for it, but it’s typically first-level thinking that fails to see the big picture.

It’s like rent control in government: on the surface, it looks like controlling what rental properties can charge will keep prices down. But ultimately what it does is decrease the incentive for people to rent property, thus creating a housing shortage. This has been the well documented outcome in cities like New York and others, all over the world (see Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy for a great treatment of this).

The reason is that cost reduction measures often cut into the very things that produce the revenue for a company — including intangibles such as employee morale. (Yes, employee morale translates into revenue because it results in employees going the extra mile, treating customers better and more proactively, generating ideas that can enhance productivity and performance, and is even a more effective way to reduce costs because it reduces turnover.)

Here’s what Jeff Pfeffer has to say on this in What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management:

In case you haven’t noticed, in spite of the many rounds of wage cuts, the major airlines have continued to lose market share to the discount carriers such as JetBlue and Southwest and have continued to bleed money. . . . That’s because the solution management seized on — cutting workers’ pay — actually doesn’t do very much to make organizations more profitable and competitive or even, in some cases, to reduce costs.

Instead, cutting employee wages often worsens company problems. Hourly rates of pay simply don’t do nearly as much as most people seem to believe to determine a company’s — or even a country’s — competitive advantage. That’s because wage rates are not the same thing as labor costs, labor costs don’t equal total costs, and — in many instances — while it is n ice to be low cost, low costs and profits aren’t perfectly correlated either. . . .

The competitive success of airlines such as Southwest, Alaska, and JetBlue depends on lots of things besides wage rates. For a start, it’s nice to be able to offer customers a product or service offering they actually want to buy. . . .

Virgin Atlantic Airways has consistently pursued a strategy of offering more amenities and better service for both its business-class and economy fares, and has generated a profit when other airlines have struggled. After further upgrading its business-class seats and service in 2004, the carrier reported a 26 percent increase in business-class traffic for the fiscal year ending in February 2005. . . .

In the automobile industry as well, profits depend on more than just costs. Profits are also affected by brand image and product design and quality, all of which affect how much people are willing to pay for a car.

There is much more to being profitable (or, for a non-profit, having the funding they need) than cutting costs and being efficient. Often, the things that are most efficient — such as making sure employees feel that they are valued and respected and treated well — appear inefficient at first. But that’s just a short-term perspective. In the long-term, these “inefficient” things are actually more efficient, because they are the best prevention of the truly large and inefficient costs of high turnover and low quality.

Here's an Example of Efficiency Destroying Effectiveness

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Following up on a post yesterday which made the point that too much of a concern for efficiency can undermine effectiveness, here is a tragic example where efficiency destroyed effectiveness.

Apparently there are some “lost tapes” which preserve the highest-quality raw feed from the moon landing in July 1969. Recently there were rumors that the tapes may have been found. But when NASA recently released some restored footage of the landing, the lost tapes were not among them.

Turns out that the tapes with this footage were most likely erased. Why? From an article on the moon landings on Fox News:

The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon.

In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 and reused them. That’s apparently what happened to the famous moon landing footage.

So in an effort to conserve tapes, the clearest footage of one of the most significant cultural achievements in history was accidentally erased.

Clearly the tapes were not erased on purpose. But that’s the damage often wreaked by the mindset of over-efficiency (even when justified by apparently significant factors, such as a shortage of tapes in this case): mistakes get made and critical, important things are often sacrificed in the charge.