Is more than half your time soaked up in company meetings? How many layers of management sit between your CEO and front-line workers? Do you understand how to get a capital expense approved?
The answer to these questions and 7 others in a new Harvard Business diagnostic tool will give you a sense of the complexity of your company. The more moving parts in your organization the more difficult it is to improve productivity, measure results, and hold managers accountable, says author Ron Ashkenas in his recent Harvard Business Review article Simplicity-Minded Management.
Complexity is often born of good intentions, he says, but winds up creating gunk in the corporate machinery.
“Well-intended responses to new business challenges — globalization, emerging technologies, and regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, to name a few — have left us with companies that are increasingly ungovernable, unwieldy, and underperforming. In many, more energy is devoted to navigating the labyrinth than to achieving results. Accountability is unclear, decision rights are muddy, and data are sliced and diced time and again, frequently with no clear idea of how the information will be used”
Sound familiar? The article offers up ways to diagnosis and repair the problem of corporate complexity, including this handy Simplicity Checklist.
Some action highlights:
- Streamline the organizational structure. Managers need “an ongoing attack on structural mitosis. That means periodically adjusting the structure to make sure it serves the business strategy and market needs and is as simple as possible….”
- Prune products, services and features. “Once the right structure is in place, simplicity-minded managers take a hard look at the products and services the company offers. Are there too many of them? Which are profitable and have the greatest growth potential? Which have run their course?…”
- Build disciplined processes.”Engaging employees across the organization in process simplification, particularly at the grassroots level, can be powerful. People at all levels become more likely to step up and correct a problem before it gums up the works….”
- Improve managerial habits. “If managers are serious about reducing complexity, they need to identify how their own (often unintentional) patterns of behavior complicate matters, and make a personal commitment to simplification….”
Do you spend more time navigating bureaucracy than creating value? Does your company feel like a living, breathing, Rube Goldberg contraption? Tell us your horror story and what you think can be done about it.
Also, read these tips for fighting the bureaucratic blahs.
(Image of Rube Goldberg contraption by freshwater2006, CC 2.0)
