Yves Morieux Quotes

The problem is that management’s quest to get a handle on a complex organization often leads to what Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman have dubbed “complicatedness”: the expansion of procedures for reporting and decision-making, requiring ever more coordination bodies, meetings, and report-writing. With all that time spent reporting, meeting, and coordinating, there is little time left for actual doing.13 This drain on time and effort is exacerbated by the tendency of executives under the spell of metric fixation to distrust the experienced judgment of those under them.

Increasingly, the winners in today’s business environment are those companies that know how to leverage complexity and exploit it to create competitive advantage.

Costs in employee time. To the debit side of the ledger must also be added the transactional costs of metrics: the expenditure of employee time by those tasked with compiling and processing the metrics—not to speak of the time required to actually read them. That is exacerbated by the “reporting imperative”—the perceived need to constantly generate information, even when nothing significant is going on. Sometimes the metric of success is the number and size of the reports generated, as if nothing is accomplished unless it is extensively documented. Those within the organization end up spending more and more time compiling data, writing reports, and attending meetings at which the data and reports are coordinated. So, as the heterodox management consultants Yves Morieux and Peter Tollman note, employees work longer and harder at activities that add little to the real productiveness of their organization, while sapping their enthusiasm.