Due to certain events out of my own control the past few weeks I've been spending quite a bit of time thinking about what the best and most productive companies I've either founded or worked for have done in comparison to the ones that were painfully bad at delivering value to shareholders and customers.
I think one of the simplest and most common problem I systematically see is bloat. Companies equate having more people as a sign of success, yet if you're not looking from an experienced operational lens it's anything but success, just added risk as they probably haven't fully developed any plan to get that person productive in the shortest time possible or developed metrics to measure not just individual performance but how the addition effects positively or negatively the overall team/business.
Bloated or gorged organisations are such a common problem but usually always caused by inexperienced management or management who rose through the ranks themselves in a gorged org. You can always tell a member of management who has a propensity to create such structures just by asking them to breakdown and detail how they would carry out a task common to one of their reports. They'll most probably be unable to break the task down into enough detail or worse be unable to carry out the task well themselves. A few years back I was interviewing people for a Chief Product Office role in another business. We had candidates apply from some very well known names in the UK financial services scene, most of them keen to gain exposure in the regulated crypto space.
After interviewing over two dozen candidates, the ones that stood out (who also weren't raving sociopaths) turned out to be the ones who not only demonstrated good people skills, orchestration of fast moving projects etc but also they had intimate knowledge of how you could go from market research, inception of an idea, create a working prototype, then validation through all these steps. The ones that failed gave answers you'd see from someone who spends most of their time delegating and orchestrating. I'm not saying that's a bad thing as those are the skills you need for a large gorged org where it's all about trying to keep the turkey fed until xmas when someone can either decide to keep feeding it or send it to the slaughter house.
I know some people will ask me if the inability to execute the jobs of their reports is really a bad thing and surely as someone moves up the management ladder this is to be expected, but I'm sorry it's not. Everything flows from the top and having bloated ineffective management, creates bloated ineffective businesses. Everything should be kept lean with people who at all levels can execute on the businesses goals and missions. It's the fastest and only reliable way to deliver real value as fast as possible, rather than the spray and pray approach I see in most organisations.
I think the biggest example I've had of this is the time I joined a business with over 150 reports. Not direct reports mind you as I also had layers upon layers of inefficient middle management who were fantastic at running useless ceremonies and generating colourful reports hiding the inefficiencies and rot of morale within the team who were drowning in bloated Agile ceremonies, toxic leaders who would berate staff due to their own inability to iteratively deliver small, measurable slices of value. The team had also been "building" for over 5 years and burned through $110 million in the process with nothing to show for it as management had built for growth instead of focusing on first principles on delivering a useable, working product that was operationally sound and met customer needs.
I'll talk more on the process I used to fix this business in another post but we went from a product and engineering org of over 150 people to only 30 in total. The end result? Increased morale as people could see their work had immediate effect. We "rebuilt" the old failing product with a new focus on meeting user and business needs which customers were finally delighted with. Most importantly it finally set us on a path to achievable profitability and this changed the game for the business as it finally meant to potential investors it was no longer a furnace burning money.