Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Tom DeMarco - Hardcover - 1 ED

1 Madmen in the Halls THE LEGACY of the nineties has been a dangerous corporate delusion: the idea that organizations are effective only to the extent that all their workers are totally and eternally busy. Anyone who's not overworked (sweating, staying late, racing from one task to the next, working Saturdays, unable to squeeze time for even the briefest meeting till two weeks after next) is looked on with suspicion. People with a little idle time on their hands may not even be safe. As one of my friends at Digital Equipment Corporation told me during the company's darkest days, "There are madmen in the halls, looking for someone to ax." Of course, the ones they were looking to ax were the folks who weren't all that busy. Crisis of Confidence Your company may not now have actual ax-wielding crazies roaming the halls, but their specter is almost certainly still with you. This is the remnant of the crisis of confidence we've just come through. Consider: As this is being written, American and western European business is in a period of extraordinary prosperity. The rest of the world is a basket case and we are healthier than we've ever been. And yet just a few short years ago, we were all in an agony of doubt. How could we survive, we wondered, against the competition of the ravenous third world, willing to work for peanuts and liable to undersell us in any market anywhere? How could we stay even with the superbly educated Japanese, or those clever and hungry workers coming out from behind the Iron Curtain, or the Taiwanese and Koreans with their superhuman work ethic and their awesome skills? Acting on our doubts, we went through a purge of excess capacity (i.e., people with homes and families). We trimmed as though our very survival depended on trimming. Wasn't it reasonable to put our house in order in this fashion? Maybe it was in the short run. It probably contributed at least somewhat to our present strength. Yet the lasting side effect of the purgethe notion that busyness is the essence of businesscan only do us long-term harm. The Price of "Putting Our House in Order" During the last ten years we have downsized, "right-sized," laid off, and fired people's butts. We have cut payrolls, closed plants, sold off divisions, and generally scared all our remaining employees to death. We nodded in approval as characters like Chainsaw Al (at one time the worst CEO in America) did their dirty work. We bid up the stocks of companies like AT&T who led the trend, i.e., led the retreat. The principal target of the cuts has been that bugaboo of organizational efficiency: middle management. We asked ourselves, "What are they, after all, those middle managers? What are they but fat? What do they really exist for other than to be cut out in the interest of efficiency?" And so we cut. We surgically removed the middle layers of our organizations, flattening the charts and widening the scope of management at each level. Was that a good thing to do? I have my doubts. Maybe middle management exists for some reason above and beyond filling the space between the top and the bottom of the hierarchy. Part of my purpose in this book is to examine what's supposed to happen in the middle of a healthy organization, the critical role of middle management. The main activity of those managers is reinvention. It is the middle of the organization where reinvention takes place. This is where the dynamic of today's organizational functioning is examined, taken apart, analyzed, resynthesized, and assembled back into new organizational models that allow us to move forward. What got cut out of the most aggressively purged organizations is the capacity to change. The so-called restructurings have, in most cases, optimizeDeMarco, Tom is the author of 'Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency - Tom DeMarco - Hardcover - 1 ED' with ISBN 9780767907682 and ISBN 076790768X.