Own the Future: 50 Ways to Win from The Boston Consulting Group

Chapter 48

Smart Simplicity

Yves Morieux

Abridged and reprinted with permission. Copyright © 2011 by Harvard Business Publishing; all rights reserved.

Companies face an increasingly complex world. Globalization and technology have opened up new markets and enabled new competitors. With an abundance of options to choose from, customers are harder to please—and more fickle—than ever. Each day, competitive advantage seems more elusive and fleeting.

In and of itself, this complexity is not a bad thing—it brings opportunities as well as challenges. The problem is the way companies respond to it. Managers redesign the organization's structure, performance measures, and incentives. More layers get added, more procedures imposed. To smooth the implementation of those “hard” changes, companies introduce “soft” initiatives designed to infuse work with positive emotions and a sense of collaboration. Such initiatives are well intentioned, but they are no match for the problems that arise when an organization becomes overly complicated.

In some of the most complicated organizations, managers spend 40 percent of their time writing reports and 30 to 60 percent of it in coordination meetings. That doesn't leave much time for them to work with their teams. As a result, employees are often misdirected and expend a lot of effort in vain. Invariably, employee satisfaction and productivity end up suffering. ...