Every corporation needs a Marie Kondo

San Francisco’s “toiletgate” is a recent demonstration that things can be even worse in the public sector: One reason for the soaring costs ($1.7 million) and delays in installing a toilet in the Noe Valley neighborhood is that, as the New York Times reports, city law “requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.” The sense of towering bureaucracy and stifling rules is even worse in the growing gray area that exists where the public and private sectors meet.

A new book, The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder by Stanford University’s Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao, produces some striking examples of managerial time-wasting. A 2019 study found that first-year doctors devoted 43 percent of their time to updating patients’ electronic medical records and only 13 percent to providing direct patient care. One promotion committee that the authors participated in at Stanford demanded 27 letters of recommendation, a dozen meetings, and more than 200 emails, all for “one of the easiest Stanford promotion cases in years.”

They note that over-complicated organizations make over-complicated demands on customers. A 2017 report by the Office of Management and Budget found that “Americans spend 11.4 billion hours on Federal paperwork per year.” A routine form that Michigan residents used to complete to obtain welfare payments consisted of 18,000 words and more than 1,000 questions (including date of conception).

The reasons for the growth of managerial clutter are debatable. After studying all sorts of things from the construction of LEGO toys to academic politics, Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia argues that the default position of human beings is to add complexity, particularly when more people are involved. Sutton and Rao talk about the managerial equivalent of the “tragedy of the commons”: Managers unthinkingly impose small tasks on workers without considering their collective costs. Empire-building surely plays a part: Managers measure their power in terms of the number of people they control and the number of projects they “own.” Few people have built great careers by asking themselves “what can I subtract” rather than “what can I add?”

Technology also plays a paradoxical role: By making it easier to communicate or assign a task, it adds to organizational pollution. People send interminable emails copied to all and sundry. Communication channels such as Slack demand to be filled. Meetings are arranged for the sake of holding meetings: Listen to people conduct their business in public places such as coffee shops and you will note that an extraordinary proportion of meeting-time is spent arranging other meetings.

All this managerial clutter degrades morale even as it wastes time. A 2022 Gallup study found that only a third of employees were fully engaged in their work, and that 18 percent were actively disengaged. Jokes abound about bureaucratic paralysis — “death by meeting,” TLDR (“too long didn’t read”), jargon monoxide, or managers in general (“the people who can get away with wasting your time”).

There have been welcome signs of a revolt against people getting away with wasting our time. Cass Sunstein recounted his fight against government time-wasting when he led the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in his aptly titled Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What To Do about It. Leidy Klotz spelled out the case for subtracting rather than adding to managerial processes in Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.

Some companies have been taking decluttering seriously. In 2013, Dropbox, Inc. CEO Drew Houston cancelled most standing meetings from employees’ calendars and banned them from adding new meetings for two weeks. “Armeetingeddon has landed” boasted the memo announcing the change. In 2015, AstraZeneca Plc. established a Simplification Center of Excellence with a “million hour challenge” to cut busywork. In 2017, Melinda Ashton, the chief quality officer at Hawaii Pacific Health, launched her Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff project, which encouraged medical staff to suggest things in the records system that ought to be removed.

Jane Fraser is engaged in a similar process of decluttering at Citigroup Inc, scrapping the overcomplicated matrix management system and cutting the headcount (5,000 lost their jobs last year). Critics like to point to the contrast between the caring Fraser who worried about too many Zoom meetings and the job-cutter who is trying to improve profitability, but both are a form of decluttering. According to a transcript of a townhall meeting seen by Bloomberg, she said of the changes at the bank that “it’s about lighter, it’s about less” and that it’s about ensuring that “we don’t have all these management processes and structures that we don’t need.”

But all these top-down spring cleaning efforts suffer from the same problem: They frequently do not last. Drew Houston admitted that by 2015 things were worse than when he issued his “Armeetingeddon” memo. Sunstein’s book was a mea culpa about why his sludge-removal efforts had failed. AstraZeneca disbanded its Simplification Center in triumph in December 2017, which is like selling your lawnmower after a particularly energetic mowing session.

Hence the need for ritualized organizational spring cleaning. Every year most companies hold annual performance reviews in which managers assess their charges and the charges respond. The spring cleaning idea would be similar, but this time around the employees would take the initiative in suggesting ways in which the company is making poor use of their time. The onus will then be on the managers to justify themselves.

The spring cleaning idea has two benefits over top-down management. First, it takes place every year and thereby becomes part of the company’s way of doing things. You are preparing for the next annual ritual and looking out for things to cut. Second, it hands power to the managed rather than the managers. It is the managed who bear the brunt of the “tragedy of the commons,” and the managed who usually have the best ideas for what needs to be preserved and what needs to be changed. Top-down initiatives such as slashing meetings usually go too far at first (some meetings are necessary) and then fade as the old habits reassert themselves and the old managers rebuild their empires. A regular spring cleaning will keep a constant pressure on management to preserve what matters and junk what gets in the way of people doing their jobs.

Adrian Wooldridge is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. Views do not represent the stand of this publication. 

Credit: Bloomberg