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Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

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Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#61

Post by mbrodersen »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #57

Personally, I've never been a fan of "the measured life." Pro athletes and ultra-high performers use these types of metrics to maximize their "potential," but it seems to come at the cost of burnout, injury, and things like mental health and family issues. I get a pretty significant amount of stuff done, and pretty well, but I could care less about measuring it. I don't compete with anyone; especially with myself. Wh…

Almost all pro/ultra high performers end up with broken bodies. Constantly pushing your body to the limit is not healthy. Being fit is not the same as being healthy. I highly recommend reading “Body by Science”. It’s a bit of an eye opener.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#62

Post by mbrodersen »

ngvrnd wrote: post #6

Ultimately, pursuit of perfect efficiency results in crystalline systems which are fragile. Slack is the ur-antifragility. (efficiency pursued for itself is AN enemy)

Yep. It also usually means no time to find better long term ways to do things. Everything is sacrificed on the alter of “efficiency” (basically cost cutting).

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#63

Post by mbrodersen »

Giho wrote: post #55

"The enemy of efficiency “You’re efficient when you do something with minimum waste. And you’re effective when you’re doing the right something.” Many organizations are obsessed with efficiency. They want to be sure every resource is utilized to its fullest capacity and everyone is sprinting around every minute of the day doing something." This is what's called productivity. Efficiency is how much the productivity al…

Yep “The Goal” is a must read to understand how to run organisations well.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#64

Post by mbrodersen »

darthrupert wrote: post #42

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 li…

I recommend reading “The Goal”. It is IMHO the best business book ever written.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#65

Post by natmaka »

nine_k wrote: post #56

Oh, hello, queue theory and parallel processing theory! As you increase utilization (remove slack), throughput may grow, but latency grows more. If your nodes interact and depend on each other, the tail latency can grow completely out of hand, in exchange to tiny gains in utilization, and the actual throughput may go down as utilization goes up past some point. Always have some free disk space. Do not run your web se…

This seems pertinent to me, and is a quite old concept.

Jacques Ellul, for example, posited that our "technical system" aims at efficiency to the point of engulfing everything, in a detrimental way because (composed with physic laws) it leads to betting on economy of scale (gigantism, centralization, specialization...).

Stephen Jay Gould "criticized the belief that evolution comes up with the best, or only, solution to a biological problem", and that organisms are always working towards fitness.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#66

Post by natmaka »

An organization either has few members and cannot tackle a huge task at a fair pace, or enjoys "unproductive" members, with no measurable output.

Some of them acts as very useful "information providers", they know who knows and "productive" members ask questions to them, and at best some are able to provide useful information even before being asked to do so.

Without them the amount of resources wasted by information vectors (service notes, meetings, mail, chat...) grows proportionally to the size of the organization.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#68

Post by Andys »

nine_k wrote: post #56

Oh, hello, queue theory and parallel processing theory! As you increase utilization (remove slack), throughput may grow, but latency grows more. If your nodes interact and depend on each other, the tail latency can grow completely out of hand, in exchange to tiny gains in utilization, and the actual throughput may go down as utilization goes up past some point. Always have some free disk space. Do not run your web se…

re: org level. This is especially true for anyone on call (pager duty).

Leaving a bit in the tank every day increases ability to respond to sudden emergencies more intelligently and with less burnout afterwards.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#69

Post by pdonis »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #39
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…

> A much better example of the benefits of slack would be a CEO who delegates the day to day work ... to give himself slack -- more time to think about big picture things and consider ways to change the organization to make it better. That's not slack. As you just pointed out , that's his regular job. Slack is unscheduled time, not time that's devoted to performing your duties. The point of slack, anywhere, is that i…

> Slack is unscheduled time, not time that's devoted to performing your duties.

Time that the CEO can spend thinking about big picture things and considering ways to change the organization to make it better is "unscheduled time". That's the point.

Re: Efficiency is the enemy? (2021)

#70

Post by thaumasiotes »

pdonis wrote: post #69
thaumasiotes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A much better example of the benefits of slack would be a CEO who delegates the day to day work ... to give himself slack -- more time to think about big picture things and consider ways to change the organization to make it better. That's not slack. As you just pointed out , that's his regular job. Slack is unscheduled time, not time that's devoted to performing your duties. The point of slack, anywhere, is that i…

> Slack is unscheduled time, not time that's devoted to performing your duties. Time that the CEO can spend thinking about big picture things and considering ways to change the organization to make it better is "unscheduled time". That's the point.

That time is often easy to reschedule. But it's not unscheduled time; if it gets reallocated to other tasks, company performance will suffer because important work isn't being done. It's not slack.

We can easily state this another way. Slack is unused capacity to do work. The CEO planning his strategy is work, the opposite of slack.

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