The Big Lie of More With Less

It's popular — and pretty easy — to complain about our modern culture of instant gratification. Almost everything;  the credit crisis, the obesity epidemic, the popularity of certain dog training TV shows, can be tied to our desire to get everything now-now-five-minutes-ago.

But instant gratification has a far uglier and more dangerous cousin. You don't see this cousin on TV or in big box stores - you see it at the office. It's "More With Less."

More With Less is the idea that a group or process is somehow inefficient and if we remove the excess...whatever...we won't just get the same results for less, we'll somehow get more. This idea is rampant in business, rampant enough that it was beautifully satirized in "The Wire" on HBO (and most likely watched by people that later went and tried to implement it at their jobs while believing the show didn't apply to them.)

The big lie behind More with Less is the fact that if one does end up with "more" (or even the same level of) output it's not because of insightful management skills or as a result of "cutting away the fat" to optimize efficiency. It's because "more" was somehow introduced to the system and the actors were unable (or unwilling) to measure it. Firing 30 customer service people and replacing them with better software is not More With Less, it's more with a more efficient system. Firing half of an accounting department and browbeating the remaining half into working longer hours isn't More With Less, it's more with someone else's time.

I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I believe the More With Less resonates so well in the U.S. because we are taught that anything is achievable with the right amount of hard work. Even when someone has clearly set us up to fail, we just dig in and drive harder. Failure is not an option! Failure is because of weakness and a lack of sufficient effort, not because someone is being foolish or just plain abusive.

This isn't to say that hard work and persistence are not good things! It's just that sometimes you need 5 people to do the work of 5 people, or you need 3 months to do 3 months of work.

When we push too hard with training — when we try to get More With Less — it's usually time that we cut back on. We (or our clients) are too busy or too impatient to put in the time required. 

Where do you suppose the unmeasured or unrecognized "more" comes from in that case?