For most businesses, efficiency equates to increased earnings and growth. But what if your "efficient" business—the one with the lower workforce and "stretch" objectives—is really slowing down and losing money? What if your workers are exhausted from doing the job of two or more people, leaving them with little time to plan, prioritize, or even eat lunch? What if you're losing personnel at a quicker rate than you're able to acquire new ones? What if your once-favorable business now lags behind?
Tom DeMarco, a prominent management consultant to Fortune 500 and emerging organizations, has identified a paradoxical concept that explains why improving efficiency can occasionally slow a company down. If your true organizational aim is to become more responsive and agile, he suggests that you need more slack rather than greater efficiency.
What exactly is "slack"? Slack is a company's degree of flexibility that permits it to evolve. It may be as easy as assigning an assistant to a department, allowing high-paid employees to spend less time at the photocopier and more time making important choices. Slack might also manifest itself in how a firm treats its employees: rather than overloading them with work, a company created with slack gives its employees freedom to breathe, improve their productivity, and reinvent themselves.
This groundbreaking manual will demolish frequently held beliefs about real-world management and provide you and your organization a brand-new model for reaching and sustaining actual effectiveness—and a healthier bottom line—through an unique method that works for both new and old economy firms.
Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.
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