13
Bad Systems
Undermine Good
People
You can take great people, highly trained and moti-
vated, and put them in a lousy system and the system
will win every time.
—Geary Rummler
Founding Partner
Performance Design Lab
A friend/colleague of ours tells the story of going to the gro-
cery store one evening to buy food for the family of a friend
who was spending a few days in the hospital. When she asked
about getting a deli tray, she was informed by the night clerk
that the woman who made them up had already left for the
evening. “I didn’t know making deli trays was such a special-
ized skill,” was her first response. But meats and cheeses still
seemed like a good idea, so she decided to create her own deli
assortment piece by piece.
She asked the clerk to thin-slice ...