THE FALLACY OF EFFICIENCY
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© September 28, 2019
Workers like to measure themselves against their own criteria and to track their progress towards their desired outcomes. It gives them a sense of “value added.” They want to be effective in what they are doing. But they resent it when they are measured on the basis of how efficiently they perform. Effectiveness is a measure of service to others; to meeting the requirements of users.
Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2nd Edition, 2014)
Insight during long recovery
Nervous about this second surgical procedure I was about to undergo, and not in an especially talkative mood, I let my mind accept matters as they were, while April, the main supervising nurse was competently coordinating a staff of medical professionals, her performance reminding me of an efficiency expert. She liked that, “it is better than an ‘air traffic controller’ that one of my previous patients compared me to.”
This current procedure called for checking the health of my heart after “open heart surgery,” which occurred more than twelve weeks ago, looking for possible blood clots about the heart by passing a tube (with camera) down my throat while sedated. If any blockage had been found, it would have negated proceeding.
My heart, since the first surgery, has been in what is called “arrhythmia,” with my pulse running at an abnormal level of around 122, when it normally varies between 56 and 65. The condition is known as “Atrial fibrillation” or AFib.” It can be corrected by shocking the heart, which was done. Afterwards, and the very next day, I felt as I once did after playing in a high school football game, seemingly sore in every bone in my body. Now, days later, I am fine, with my blood pressure and pulse now in my normal range.
Nurse April’s efficiency found my mind wondering to the disparity, however, between “efficiency and effectiveness,” precipitating these reflections.
Output versus Outcomes
My long corporate career has convinced me that “efficiency” is a misnomer as a description of effective human endeavor; more like a stop sign in which those in charge take comfort in the idea of seeing efficiency as a fait accompli; failing to note, necessarily, that the results (output) are not always consistent with those expected (outcomes). On the contrary, the opposite is more likely to be the case for the emphasis is on the wrong focus.
Workers in the 21st century no longer react to the authoritative dictums of management like the automatons Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) chose to view them as being a hundred years ago. Taylor, father of the efficiency movement, which dominated a good part of the 20th century, especially in the United States, is the author of The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) where he wrote:
“One of the very first requirements for man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.”
Not to be outdone, the esteemed Alfred Pritchard Sloan, Jr. (1875 – 1966), CEO of General Motors, took pride in announcing that GM never missed a dividend to stock holders during The Great Depression, while 20 percent of the American workforce was under/unemployed. Today his name is immortalized in The Sloan School of Management at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Why the fallacy to efficiency?
If you focus on efficiency measurements, chances are you get the output you expect. But if you focus on process, and correct chronic problems at the source, you are promoting effectiveness and can possibly realize outcomes beyond expectations.
With such a process focus, attention is directed at the vital few problems that make up 80 percent of the difference as opposed to being obsessed with doing everything right the first time. This leads to a fixation on the trivial many problems that make up only 20 percent of the desired outcomes. In the face of this, the irony is that quality award programs, which has become a burgeoning industry within itself, remain notably popular and totally loyal to efficiency.
We have seen this with the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, an award that recognizes U.S. organizations in business, healthcare, education, and the nonprofit sector for quality performance in terms of excellence. We have also seen it with The Deming Statistical Prize. Caveat:
If there is not a significant cultural change from the top to the bottom, whatever the sincerity of intentions the results will be disappointing.
This was the case with Florida Power & Light. Jim Alyea writes in his article, “Total Quality Management” (2012):
(Disappointed with the results of Deming’s “Seven Point Quality Statistical Process”) FDL made sweeping changes during the months following receipt of the award. The more stringent requirements of Deming’s quality program, though not abandoned, were pushed into the background. The Quality Department was reduced from 85 full-time individuals monitoring the quality teams to 6, and the quality-related departments set up during the award application process to do statistical “quality reviews” were disbanded. The number of tracked “quality indicators” were cut from 41 to 3.
Clearly, FPL was set on winning the award and not of a mind to make a distinct cultural change to bring everyone on board. An experience with an American subsidiary in Europe relates to this.
As Director of Human Resources Planning & Development for an American fortune 500 company in Europe during the 1980s, I experienced the sham that this can turn out to be. From Work Without Managers, 2ND edition, 2014, pp. 214-216:
Imagine a small high tech operation in which 400 employees conscientiously come to work every day. This operation — once a highly competitive leader in its specialized field — suddenly finds itself in a desperate survival mode with executives working seven days a week (some ten to 12 hours a day), vainly struggling to keep the operation afloat.
In this situation, work means executives cordoning themselves off from other employees, frantically running from meeting to meeting — from marketing to sales; from engineering to production; from crisis to crisis. The operation is under siege, and no one has time to think, much less smile, as morbid activity fills a humorless void.
Meetings provide the worry beads for this anxious group with preparation for meetings leaving little time for calm reflection. Work, albeit undeniably laborious, finds no one with either the inclination or courage to call ‘time out’ for a sanity check.
Yet, at this most critical moment, the focus is shifted suddenly from ‘the problem’ and refocused on the demands of the corporate fathers for a Total Quality Management review. All energy is now rededicated to an elaborate presentation of the ‘State of Quality,’ combining CYA and SYA ‘show and tell’ documentation. A veritable magnum opus of 1300 pages is generated, with copies, of course, for all corporate fathers. The text is then featured in a four-hour, 400-Power Point presentation in living color.
Someone from another planet watching this spectacle might conclude “there is no intelligent life on the planet earth.”
The corporate fathers, numbed to the bone at the conclusion of this exercise, reciprocate by directing the staff to return to the drawing board and “simplify, codify and verify your findings.”
After weeks of Herculean effort, you would think the profound shock of this would break staff members’ composure — if not their decorum (see Sisyphus). Instead, you see faces filled with weary resignation (except the secretarial pool — their marriages are on hold, and to them, it is “enough already!”). As one secretary put it, “It’s as if all my energies were poured down a black hole, without the slightest hint of light.”
Sisyphus in Hades - condemned to roll a stone up a hill, only to have it roll down again as it nears the top for eternity.
This epitomizes corpocracy at its most debilitating stage. ‘Non-thinking thinking’ to do ‘non-doing doing’ of ‘non-thing things’ becomes a matter of routine — or “if you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with bullshit.” This was the effort of 80 men and women against an organization of 400.
Stated otherwise, 80 self-appointed saviors operated without the support, input, or involvement of the other 320. Yes — 80 people were observed pushing the great stone of Sisyphus up the slope, while four times that number stood by and watched (laughing through their teeth).
“It’s not our problem,” the multitude sings in chorus. “Management got its tit in the ringer! Let management get it out!” These workers are ‘having none of it.’ So glib. So righteous. So comfortable in their ignorance. They are not simply irresponsible; they are nonresponsive.
Not a single worker interviewed stopped to think it was his or her job that was on the line. Management takes care of its own. Shake the tree and it lands on different branches; or at the very least is given a golden parachute to break its fall. Not so the workers. Poverty faces them. Outplacement counseling, two week’s severance pay, and encouraging words don’t feed a family for very long.
Then to add insult to injury, giving credence to these workers’ passivity, the Total Quality Management team was given handsome bonuses and everyone else a company party. After six months, operations slipped back to how they had been before the frenzied drive for the quality award.
Incidentally, The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQA) is an award established by the U.S. Congress in 1987 to raise awareness of quality management and recognize U.S. companies that have implemented successful quality management systems. The award is the nation's highest presidential honor for performance excellence. So, US politics has had a hand in this deception. This high tech subsidiary was committed to winning a quality award similar to the MBQA. The 20 percent that represented management and direct reports worked feverishly seven days a week for literally months to win the award while the 20 percent not designated management sat on their hands.
You cannot change the value system of any entity with a corporate sponsored award system until you first change the organization’s mindset and culture. Expediency is always ephemeral.
Organizations are not unlike individuals in that once recognized and esteemed for the hard work necessary to achieve an award, whatever its legitimacy, there is a high probability that to sustain that positive spirit mechanisms must be in place that celebrate that precious esteem every day. It is best that these mechanisms be unobtrusive as FPL’s Deming protocols read too much like efficiency devices, which inevitably are found obtrusive.
Alas, quality is not an award or a designated factor, but a ubiquitous mind-set, which is a cultural phenomenon and cannot be transferred to a specific group or a segment of operations (as was the case in Geneva, Switzerland where the Procurement Department’s management got monetary bonuses while workers got “high fives, and nothing else). For if it has an exclusive management designation, as it did in Geneva, quality is likely to have a short life span.
The same can be said of Quality Control Circles (QCC). They worked miraculously well in Japan, Inc., especially during the 1980s and 1990s, because Japan, at the time, was an exclusively collective society with a group think mentality while the United States was/is an individualistic society with self-interests dominating its ego driven mentality.
Making this matter even more perplexing , Japan today is still primarily a blue collar working society with a growing professional class, while the United States has been a professional workforce for nearly 40 years (see “The Worker, Alone,” 1995).
Professionals are salaried like management and do not respond well to being treated as if only grammar school graduates. The protocol, policies & procedures, and rules of engagement, although still widely practiced, have more in common with workers of pre-WWII than with workers in this new century. That said, professional workers too often are obliged to follow the dictates of authority figures (“position power”) who are often out of touch with the technical requirements of work today and sullied with obsolescent skills and know how. Meanwhile, professionals with “knowledge power” sit on their hands and take orders from headquarters. Effectiveness is sacrificed for order. This is not new situation. American business has operated in “1945 nostalgia” for nearly 75 years. Those in charge are the same gray beards only they are the grandsons or great-grandsons of their descendants.
QCC’s have had some success in the United States with hourly blue collar workers but that has tapered off precipitously in light of the fact that blue collar workers are now mainly professionals with credentials.
Why is society always 50 to 100 years behind the times?
The answer, at least to me, is obvious. It is well established but ignored. That is because most authority figures who control the screws of the economic, industrial, military, educational and government machine refuse to turn the screws a single turn to allow fresh ideas to germinate. Let’s face it, Corporate America is dedicated to the status quo come hell or high water.
American Corporate Management’s investment is in maintaining power and control with its antiquated “position power” while tossing crumbs and pointless kudos to the burgeoning “knowledge power” professional workforce, which is too timid to read the tea leaves. So, everything remains as it is, which is gridlock or the modus operandi of the day.
In fact, Corporate Management will stubbornly defend matters as they exist pointing out that the America’s economy is booming during a trade war with China, that the Dow Jones Industrial are flirting with an all-time high, that the low unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, and that more women and minorities have jobs and improving economic status than ever before. It can be argued that all or most of this is true.
But buried in the fine print of these truisms is the fact that the world is refusing to change with the prevalent challenging indicators of the times such as pollution and global warming, not to mention violence in our cities, workplaces, schools and businesses.
These figures hide an important fact that nobody, especially those at the top of the power grid are likely to admit:
1 Management, as it is, has become redundant, obsolete, and counter-productive, yet more colleges and universities have MBA programs feeding this glutted market with knowledge workers with anachronistic credentials and atavistic skills.
2 Institutional government as it is now practiced, is glutted with a House of Representative and a Senate in perennial polarity as governance has been reduced to self-interested obtuseness. Moreover, many if not the majority belong to the affluent class with little in common with the majority of Americans. Trained in the discipline of gridlock, since most are attorneys, litigious engagement is the order of the day. They find new ways to avoid the challenges of the people’s business.
3 In the absence of dealing with matters at hand, we have become a jingoistic or cliché driven society. Politics has become mainly social and self-conscious. Simplistic expressions have become surrogate for action: Buck Stops Here, Walk the Talk, Open door policy, American Exceptionalism, Harvard, Princeton, Yale Elitism (HYPE), American righteousness (imperialism), Might makes right. Right to bear arms (NRA), Civil disobedience (CRM), Black Power, Right to life (antiabortionists), Right to control my body (Feminism), Gay Pride, Gay Rights, Black Pride, Black Lives Matter and so on.
What I would have liked to have shared with April
Like above, I would have liked to have shared one of the lessons learned along the way with excerpts from published works and missives from my blog (e.g., The Peripatetic Philosopher.blogspot.com).
American Corporate Management’s investment is in maintaining power and control with its antiquated “position power” while tossing crumbs and pointless kudos to the burgeoning “knowledge power” professional workforce, which is too timid to read the tea leaves. So, everything remains as it is, which is gridlock or the modus operandi of the day.
In fact, Corporate Management will stubbornly defend matters as they exist pointing out that the America’s economy is booming during a trade war with China, that the Dow Jones Industrial are flirting with an all-time high, that the low unemployment is the lowest it has been in years, and that more women and minorities have jobs and improving economic status than ever before. It can be argued that all or most of this is true.
But buried in the fine print of these truisms is the fact that the world is refusing to change with the prevalent challenging indicators of the times such as pollution and global warming, not to mention violence in our cities, workplaces, schools and businesses.
These figures hide an important fact that nobody, especially those at the top of the power grid are likely to admit:
1 Management, as it is, has become redundant, obsolete, and counter-productive, yet more colleges and universities have MBA programs feeding this glutted market with knowledge workers with anachronistic credentials and atavistic skills.
2 Institutional government as it is now practiced, is glutted with a House of Representative and a Senate in perennial polarity as governance has been reduced to self-interested obtuseness. Moreover, many if not the majority belong to the affluent class with little in common with the majority of Americans. Trained in the discipline of gridlock, since most are attorneys, litigious engagement is the order of the day. They find new ways to avoid the challenges of the people’s business.
3 In the absence of dealing with matters at hand, we have become a jingoistic or cliché driven society. Politics has become mainly social and self-conscious. Simplistic expressions have become surrogate for action: Buck Stops Here, Walk the Talk, Open door policy, American Exceptionalism, Harvard, Princeton, Yale Elitism (HYPE), American righteousness (imperialism), Might makes right. Right to bear arms (NRA), Civil disobedience (CRM), Black Power, Right to life (antiabortionists), Right to control my body (Feminism), Gay Pride, Gay Rights, Black Pride, Black Lives Matter and so on.
What I would have liked to have shared with April
Like above, I would have liked to have shared one of the lessons learned along the way with excerpts from published works and missives from my blog (e.g., The Peripatetic Philosopher.blogspot.com).
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