Entropy, man. Or the driver of Kuhnian paradigm shifts--the old ways persist until the inherent contradictions can no longer be rationalized and have come into open conflict. Au fond (pun intended) is the curious mental accounting that overweights $1 of revenue against $1 of cost savings (except when time comes for headcount trimming). I saw this in banking. Loan production was a profit center where volume was king. Loan servicing was a cost center where unit cost minimization was exalted. You can anticipate where this goes, so details are omitted.
I never worked in finance, but in 2007 was working out of 100 Broadway, like two blocks from the NYSE... I lived exactly where that went. Your point about the Kuhnian paradigm shift is really good tho. It's exactly the same process but I hadn't connected it in my head.
This reminds me of the nightmare back in the 1980's that was process mapping. Months of my life were frittered away listening to consultants and drawing huge flowcharts, and covering them with sticky notes, so we could redesign our processes, find the gaps where there was no real process, etc. It actually made sense, but when push came to shove, the needed changes rarely got sufficient executive backing to make it happen. One guy did have the cojones to fix the annual budget process, which changed it from a 13 month process (yes, 13 months for an annual process) down to 6 months. He was made CFO. What I saw was that the problem with creating an efficient process is that it usually crossed departmental boundaries, and so any change in the status quo stepped on too many toes. Only a deep commitment from very high up could force a change.
Oh yeah, even at my work, if a project has to cross an organizational boundary of some sort, the difficulty essentially grows exponentially and chances of success drops, worse when you cross more boundaries... Hell, there's effectively a layer of levels where finding/driving these large cross-org efforts is effectively their job... I'd like to say that's a pathological symptom of bureaucracy but honestly it feels like just an organic response to "well, someone's gotta ram things through if we're to have any hope of doing this massive reorgs every year"
This is a really fantastic article. I think you've identified something very real.
There is a cost to the dialectical process. If businesses could use an ounce of Pythagorean theorum (anticipate the pendulum swing: change half as often and half as extreme) they could likely save a bit of money.
Entropy, man. Or the driver of Kuhnian paradigm shifts--the old ways persist until the inherent contradictions can no longer be rationalized and have come into open conflict. Au fond (pun intended) is the curious mental accounting that overweights $1 of revenue against $1 of cost savings (except when time comes for headcount trimming). I saw this in banking. Loan production was a profit center where volume was king. Loan servicing was a cost center where unit cost minimization was exalted. You can anticipate where this goes, so details are omitted.
I never worked in finance, but in 2007 was working out of 100 Broadway, like two blocks from the NYSE... I lived exactly where that went. Your point about the Kuhnian paradigm shift is really good tho. It's exactly the same process but I hadn't connected it in my head.
This reminds me of the nightmare back in the 1980's that was process mapping. Months of my life were frittered away listening to consultants and drawing huge flowcharts, and covering them with sticky notes, so we could redesign our processes, find the gaps where there was no real process, etc. It actually made sense, but when push came to shove, the needed changes rarely got sufficient executive backing to make it happen. One guy did have the cojones to fix the annual budget process, which changed it from a 13 month process (yes, 13 months for an annual process) down to 6 months. He was made CFO. What I saw was that the problem with creating an efficient process is that it usually crossed departmental boundaries, and so any change in the status quo stepped on too many toes. Only a deep commitment from very high up could force a change.
Oh yeah, even at my work, if a project has to cross an organizational boundary of some sort, the difficulty essentially grows exponentially and chances of success drops, worse when you cross more boundaries... Hell, there's effectively a layer of levels where finding/driving these large cross-org efforts is effectively their job... I'd like to say that's a pathological symptom of bureaucracy but honestly it feels like just an organic response to "well, someone's gotta ram things through if we're to have any hope of doing this massive reorgs every year"
This is a really fantastic article. I think you've identified something very real.
There is a cost to the dialectical process. If businesses could use an ounce of Pythagorean theorum (anticipate the pendulum swing: change half as often and half as extreme) they could likely save a bit of money.