Decluttering the company

PETER DRUCKER once observed that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” Nine years after the management guru’s death, his remark is truer than ever: employees often have to negotiate a mass of clutter—from bulging inboxes to endless meetings and long lists of objectives to box-tick—before they can focus on their real work. For the past 50 years manufacturers have battled successfully to streamline their factory floors and make them “lean”. Today, businesses of all types need to do the same in their offices.

The most debilitating form of clutter is organisational complexity. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has been tracking this for a representative sample of companies in the United States and Europe since 1955 (when the Fortune 500 list was created). BCG defines complexity broadly to include everything from tiers of management to the numbers of co-ordinating bodies and corporate objectives. It reckons that, overall, the complexity of organisations has increased sixfold since then. There has been an explosion of “performance imperatives”: in 1955 firms typically embraced between four and seven of them; today, as they strain themselves to be kind to the environment, respectful of diversity, decent to their suppliers and the like, it is 25-40.