Pear Shaped

An angry rant about efficiency, calling people useful idiots, and lots of brain tickling references to Czech dissident and eventual president Vaclav Havel

Vaclav Havel has his tale of the greengrocer. It’s a good story because though it is about a greengrocer, at the same time it’s also about communism, truth, fear, power and the human condition.

In the story, Havel’s greengrocer puts a sign in his shop window.

WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!

The thing is though, this greengrocer does not believe in the workers of the world uniting. Spoiler alert. He’s not sitting between his potatoes and the cabbages hoping for an international uprising of the proletariat. He just wants to sell vegetables and avoid unnecessary hassle.

The sign isn’t an expression of belief. By displaying it, the greengrocer is really saying something much more mundane and similarly much more tragic.

“I understand how things are done around here and I won’t rock the boat and please don’t drag me out of bed at 3am and send me to a gulag”

I think marketing has its own version of the greengrocer’s sign.

“Efficiency.”

At this very second, somewhere, somebody is looking at a slide with the word Efficiency written on it in a sans-serif typeface.

But nobody is putting “Efficiency” on the slide because they spent six months rigorously comparing the available options for what to put on a slide before eventually concluding that yes, this was indeed the hill they wished to die on. They put it on the slide because organisations like theirs are supposed to have Efficiency somewhere on the slide . In exactly the same way Havel’s greengrocer hangs his sign not because he particularly wants to unite the workers of the world, but because respectable greengrocers, particularly those who wish to continue being respectable and remain in possession of their kneecaps, display the appropriate slogans.

The slogan is signalling fluency. Obedience.

It’s saying: I know how things are done around here.

Once something gets to this point it becomes difficult to inspect. Not many people are interrupting meetings to ask the question of whether efficiency is really a sensible principle for a business. When a critical mass of people who don’t know what they’re talking about talk about something without questioning it, well, you’re screwed, basically.

That is a shame. Efficiency is an odd thing to build a business philosophy around.

Efficiency is not in of itself a bad thing. Efficiency is fairly neutral. Steam engines should be efficient. Washing machines ought to be efficient. But efficiency seems to have been promoted from being a useful engineering concept into a fundamentally strategic one, and those two things are not the same.

Efficiency can only ever tell you how well you’ve done something you’ve already decided to do. It has absolutely nothing to say about whether doing that thing was a good idea in the first place. And that is a glaring omission.

Benign Insurgency

The irony for anyone in advertising is that monitoring efficiency is usually bundled within the strategy departments’ remit. When in fact, it is quite literally the opposite of what strategy should be focused upon.

Strategy is concerned with making choices under uncertainty. It asks awkward questions. Which customers should we ignore? Which assumptions have we mistaken for facts? Strategy is by its very nature a sort of ‘benign insurgency’, forever dragging scrutiny back up the chain of command asking whether the thing everybody is working on is actually worth doing.

Efficiency accepts the plan as a given and concerns itself only with the execution.

But a cursory Google or trip to the library is enough to teach us that extraordinarily efficient execution can merrily coexist with catastrophically poor judgement.

If anything, efficiency and poor judgement tend to take the stage as a comedy double act.

The reason for that is that efficiency is downstream of agreement.

The moment somebody says “Let’s focus on efficiency”, they’ve implicitly accepted everything that came before that sentence. The objective. The strategy. The hierarchy. The incentives. The assumptions. And then the only thing left to debate is how to do all of it a little bit faster and a little bit cheaper.

There is no challenge to the system there, just a subtle promise to serve it better. Efficiency is appealing to both poor decision makers and the useful idiots who will carry out those decisions.

This is why efficiency has become such a suffocating obsession. Nobody gets into trouble for asking their team to work with fewer resources. Quite the opposite. To a manager’s boss it sounds delightful. The sort of thing that gets you a pat on the head from someone in a Patagonia gilet.

And for the people executing the highly efficient but poorly imagined plan, efficiency offers something perversely appealing: The opportunity to not have to think. If you truly do not care about what you’re doing and just want to collect a paycheque, then efficiency is the perfect mantra. Don’t make decisions, just do whatever is cheapest.

But honestly, and this is maybe the second fundamental point of this rant, I doubt many businesses are really even constrained by inefficiency.

Think about the last ten places you’ve worked at or with. Were they full of brilliant ideas being tragically undermined by people taking seventeen minutes too long to answer emails? Did the business narrowly miss greatness because Keith who manages the stockroom ordered too many Post-it Notes?

Or was the problem something more fundamental?

The wrong product. The wrong audience. The wrong positioning. The wrong internal incentive structures. The wrong measure of success.

Things don’t often go pear-shaped because people have executed the right strategy inefficiently. Things go pear-shaped when the wrong strategy is executed with highly efficient competence.

At least Havel’s greengrocer got to sell potatoes.