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Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

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Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#41

Post by hinkley »

manachar wrote: post #18
pdonis wrote: post #4

The article's central illustration actually contradicts the claimed point. In the illustration, the secretary, Gloria, has slack, but the purpose her slack serves is not to enable change, which is basically what the article claims slack is for. Gloria's slack is just to make sure that Tony, the CEO, doesn't have any slack: he's working all the time on whatever he thinks is highest priority, and never takes a break. A…

I think the challenge here is that efficiency is always relative to the position the observer is measuring it from. In the case of Gloria, she should have some amount of slack to figure out how to do the big picture items of her job better, which include how better to help Tony. Where things get tricky is when looking at the whole organization there's been a long tendency to see "slack" as "fat" that's to be trimmed.…

> For example, McDonald's isn't looking for their frontline staff to do any thinking.

They tend to punish it. I say that I learned from fast food: how to mop a floor, how to remove burnt coffee, and the value of an education/career.

I think because they work with a lot of teenagers, they tend to get away with belittling people and getting because you’re two back-talks from fired, and you’re not sophisticated enough yet for the subtle burn they can’t write you up for.

“Give a man a little power” was never more clear to me. They have their little empire of dirt and they are going to defend it.

The biggest asshole had a brother who was a pro baseball player. As if what your brother does makes you important (my own brother hated that idea). Congratulations, you sell burgers all day. Your parents must be proud.

The best of them had a mild case of impostor syndrome he tried to cover. Told too many dad jokes, but still top 3 for managers in a clutch situation. I hope he did something with himself besides ace school field trips dropping in on us unannounced.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#42

Post by darthrupert »

This is the best business-related article I remember reading ever. It focuses exactly on what I have been feeling being wrong about how we lead our businesses and more importantly, ourselves. In hindsight, it’s obvious: I’m always at my most creative when I’m not trying to do something, but I only manage to achieve that state of mind when on vacation. Other times, I keep trying to do things.

One would think that a life-long fascination of zen buddhism would have taught me that already but I guess not.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#43

Post by andrewla »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #25
andrewla wrote: post #16

Related to the concept of efficiency / slack is the concept of a Moral Maze (from Robert Jackall) [1] or Immoral Maze (the same thing but renamed for clarity) [2]. [1] https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199729883 [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zpA2Tnp2k38qSmr8J/how-to-ide...

I'm not sure how Moral Mazes relates to this topic, can you explain the links to me a little bit more?

One aspect of a Moral Maze is that it systematically removes slack:

> A world without slack is not a place one wants to be. Mazes systematically erase all slack. Slack is evidence of not being fully committed, and given that everyone’s skills are equal and competition is perfect, holding anything back means losing even if undetected. [1]

And an article by Zvi on the specific concept [2].

My take, and my experience, says that a lot of what makes a moral maze is an organization where professional managers engage in a large-scale effort to ensure that blame or negative consequences flow past them. So you advance by building a maze around yourself so that negative results miss you and you grab credit for positive results that have to flow through you.

When people "on the line" do good work, you can leech off of that. And as long as your organization does good work you can do fine. But if your organization becomes marginal or if you're trying to outcompete other middle managers, you have to find a way to pass that downstream. As a generic "manager" you can't add value on the line, but it's very easy to blame lack of results on lack of efficiency (too much slack) so that's what gets sacrificed.

[1] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-i...

[2] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#44

Post by hammock »

Pick the right tool for the job, based on its sheer ability to perform, not on its efficiency at performing.

Once you have a process that works, then you can focus on driving more efficiency out of it.

AKA watch out for premature optimization.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#45

Post by sidpatil »

jrs235 wrote: post #13
ip26 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's both - an example of how slack in one system (Gloria) enables higher efficiency in another (Tony) and surmisably higher overall output.

Correct. Individual slack (available capacity, aka not running 100% efficient) enables and allows for organizational efficiency, higher output, and agility (the ability to respond to things). Just like running 100% lean (just in time efficiency) reduces overall resilience when snags occur. Having SOME slack (available capacity) allows for agility when things go awry.

This is essentially Little's law.

https://blog.danslimmon.com/2016/08/26/the-most-important-th...

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#46

Post by bumby »

hkt wrote: post #37
bee_rider wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a world where CEO time is apparently worth like 300X worker time, how many secretaries is the right number? I guess it is however many it takes to keep the CEO completely saturated with work...

Assuming salary maps to value add, let's say if the CEO is worth 300x the secretary, he needs 300 secretaries.

I'm not sure if this comment was meant tongue-in-cheek, but wouldn't this assume the administrative overhead scales on a linear 1:1 ratio with the CEO's value? If a engineer's value is 2x another's, it doesn't necessarily mean the former uses, say, 2x the electricity/copier machine/office space. But maybe that was your point and I'm being dense.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#47

Post by margalabargala »

oicU00 wrote: post #22
pdonis wrote: post #4

The article's central illustration actually contradicts the claimed point. In the illustration, the secretary, Gloria, has slack, but the purpose her slack serves is not to enable change, which is basically what the article claims slack is for. Gloria's slack is just to make sure that Tony, the CEO, doesn't have any slack: he's working all the time on whatever he thinks is highest priority, and never takes a break. A…

If the roles are both equally necessary, why does the CEO make so much more than the secretary? The CEOs entire enterprise is due to others. If anything explicitly highlighting that undermines the myth they’re the experts. Both of your models rely on the CEO delegating to focus on the right state change for the business, so I’m not sure why you create two scenarios with squishy ideas of a CEO being efficient or slack…

> If the roles are both equally necessary, why does the CEO make so much more than the secretary?

Most jobs don't set salary based on the necessity of having someone in that role, it's usually based on how difficult it is to find a capable person in that role.

If there are 100k people capable of doing the job of the secretary, and 5k people capable of doing the job of the CEO, then the CEO will be able to negotiate a higher pay rate.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#48

Post by ddingus »

Efficiency by what measure?

I like this piece. It speaks to an efficiency measure very often overlooked!

The way I see this is everything comes with costs and risks. Good systems manage those.

But they are not entirely eliminated.

And that's the game! Running full capacity is more expensive than some reduced capacity, and what that number is depends on what an organization has incoming.

Low latency responses to high priority events very seriously reduces overall costs. Having some degree of capacity to deal with it makes a ton of sense.

Invariably, someone else sees that as an unused resource.

The argument will be made that Gloria could actually be doing a lot and simply drop it when Tony ends up needing stuff.

And while true, task switches are not free, nor is basic human readiness. For Tony, he values knowing Gloria has command of the details and has good processes she has likely used idle time to conceive.

For Gloria, jumping into action is expected and normal. She is not haggard into a crappy state every day.

Efficiency has different measures.

I have seen similar in manufacturing where any capacity left unused seems like money left on the table. But the truth is people are often employing ideas to make their jobs easier, bring quality up, and the like.

Sometimes parts need rework. Stuff happens. Doing that may well be transparent to others given there is some capacity to get the rework done.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#50

Post by anon_123g987 »

bee_rider wrote: post #33

Efficiency sounds so nice, but ever since working on a safety based project and observing 1) Efficiency hates redundancy 2) Redundancy is, like, the easiest, most zero-thought way of adding robustness I've been a little suspicious of efficiency. And we see questionable efficiency optimizations all over -- here in an individual business, in the greater economy (Let's over-specialize our economies, it is more efficient…

If robustness is what's important to you, then your challenge is to do that efficiently.

For example, maybe you can use something like the Reed–Solomon error correction, which allows you to balance between no redundancy and full duplication, both in cost and benefit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%E2%80%93Solomon_error_cor...

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