Decluttering The Company
There is a great article over at The Economist that highlights the common causes of clutter that slow businesses down.
These are a few of quotes that jumped out at me.
Clutter is taking a toll on both morale and productivity. Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School studied the daily routines of more than 230 people who work on projects that require creativity.
As might have been expected, she found that their ability to think creatively fell markedly if their working days were punctuated with meetings. They did far better if left to focus on their projects without interruption for a large chunk of the day, and had to collaborate with no more than one colleague.
The best way to institutionalise decluttering is to force managers to justify any bureaucracy they introduce. Seagate Technology, a data-storage company, and Boeing, an aircraft-maker, both hold their executives accountable for the “organisational load” that they impose on their subordinates in terms of meetings, memos and initiatives, and measure them against their peers.
As Bain points out, the most valuable resource that many companies have is the time of their employees. And yet they are typically far less professional about managing that time than they are at managing their financial assets.