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> removing waste is always beneficial. The problem isn't that the change isn't worthwhile. It's that a company's threshold for "significant" is too high I don'

> removing waste is always beneficial. The problem isn't that the change isn't worthwhile. It's that a company's threshold for "significant" is too high I don't disagree in theory. But convincing someone to spend time money on something with a low ROI is usually a challenge. A bunch of low ROI projects, coordinated over time, can provide a larger ROI when viewed strategically, but you have to have the right people in place to take that view.

wpietri 7y ago
Definitely! And I think that's often symptomatic of other organizational issues. E.g., A lot of American business culture focuses on local incentives and optimizations. If a manager is being evaluated and paid based on metrics A, B, and C, how much can we expect them to ignore that and solve systemic problems? The standard MBA solution to this is that higher-level managers must design ever more elaborate systems to correctly measure the right behaviors. But a) that's somewhere between hard and impossible, b) the people filling those positions are only human, and c) the average CEO tenure is ~5 years, and executive tenure in a given position is even lower, so there's not a lot of incentive for anybody to create a system optimized for long-term value.