The Practical Drucker

CHAPTER  |  THIRTEEN

You Can Accomplish More with Less

Everyone knows that despite what leaders sometimes demand, you can't do more with less—or can you? I've heard it expressed as “you can't get blood out of a turnip.” But many leaders of organizations have announced that “we must learn to do more with less.” And in a surprisingly large number of cases, they went on to do exactly that.

I saw an economist on television discussing the difficulty in getting back the jobs lost during the recession. “In many cases,” he explained, “companies have found that they didn't actually need the employees who were laid off. In other cases, they simply used the money they formerly paid the laid-off employees to accomplish the same jobs more efficiently and ...