Some great minds have worked in increasing the performance of management.
Einstein is one of them, although may not have known it when he said: ‘Everything should be made as simple as possible, and no simpler’.
Along the same lines, 20 years later Einstein’s mate Peter Drucker said a similar thing: ‘Much of what we call management consists of making it hard for people to work’
Never was a truer word said about the machinations and genuflections usually necessary to get anything done in any organisational bureaucracy.
Organisations evolved to give us leverage, no one person can build something as simple and today basic as a computer mouse. There is a huge pool of people who all contribute from the electronics to the physical formation and design of the thing. This pooling of resources allows us to scale. This is not a new phenomenon. We have been complicating our lives since we moved away from subsistence family level groups. This classic genealogy of a pencil: ‘I, Pencil’ by Leonard Reed was written in 1946, well after we started complicating our lives by fragmenting and specialising tasks to achieve scale.
The down sides are real.
The added transaction costs in scaling operations, necessary to manage all the divergent and disparate jobs that need to be done, go largely unreported. As a result, they linger like a fart in an elevator, making life a bit more complex and often unpleasant.
The basis of all the thinking that has been labelled ‘Lean’ is flow, a necessary pre-condition to profitable scaling.
How do you get things to flow, to manage to the constraints of the value stream, thereby focussing attention on the constraints in some sort of order to be able to address them progressively in the most productivity delivering manner.
Achieving flow is akin to deep cleaning the elevator. It removes the lingering residue of people creating friction, making life more complicated than it needs to be.
