I saw one of my dear friends, a teacher, at Starbucks today helping another teacher prepare some of her materials required under the “No Child Left Behind” Act – dozens and dozen of pages that every teacher is required to submit, but that probably no one at the state or federal level really reads. It reminded me of similarly stupid things that went on in companies I have worked in – such as 100 page “process documents” that cost the company tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to prepare, but that no one read or used.
I have a theory about how these things come into being. Somewhere in the upper levels of management some senior manager proclaims a “thou shalt”, usually in response to some problem or mistake the company has just made, and usually without thinking about it very much. The underlings all race to implement something that will let them report in the next month or so that they have complied with the “thou shalt” and checked off the action item. The senior manager, if he/she even remembers issuing the “thou shalt”, eventually gets briefed that his/her action has been implemented, and never bothers to see whether the implementation is actually solving the problem it was supposed to solve, and the underlings of course all give glowing reports about how well it is going, and yet another really stupid idea gets foisted on the people who are trying to get the real work done.
I recall a retired chemist here at Los Alamos Lab telling me that he finally retired when he found it took two days of safety paperwork before he could pour a substance from one beaker to another. No doubt all this paperwork originated in some accident or near-accident that prompted some senior manager to require better record keeping ( a perfectly reasonable idea ), and that then ,through the inevitable bureaucracy, morphed into the ridiculous requirement that eventually emerged, impeding everyone’s work and costing the lab thousands of unnecessary labor hours.
In my experience in large companies, I would estimate something like 20-30% of the effort, labor hours, and budget is wasted on such foolishness. Goals like “zero defects”, or “documented processes”, or ISO9000 or CMM compliance or "six sigma" programs spawn whole departments that take on a life of their own and justify their existence by imposing yet more requirements on the people doing real productive work. It’s not that these ideas are bad – many of them are quite sound. It’s that the organization loses sight of what it is really trying to accomplish with these ideas, and morphs them into unnecessary and usually ineffective makework.
I don’t have a solution for this, and it may simply be inevitable in large organizations, but senior managers would do well to pay more attention to how their “thou shalts” are being implemented, and whether they are really effective. I recall that Robert Townsend, onetime CEO of AVIS (and the man who made them a real contender in the field), ruled that no new paperwork could be created anywhere in AVIS without his express approval, and it was hard to get his approval. That was smart.
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