About Dan Markovitz
Dan Markovitz is the founder and president of TimeBack Management. Prior to founding his own firm, Mr. Markovitz held management positions at Sierra Designs, Adidas, CNET and Asics Tiger. Learn More...
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Leveling; smoothing out the flow; e.g., doing two performance evaluations a day for 3 weeks, rather than ten a day for three days -- and then needing to take a vacation because you're so burned out.
Overburdening people, process, or equipment; e.g., people working 100 hour weeks for months on end -- come to think of it, like most lawyers and accountants.
Uneveness or variability; e.g., leaving work at the normal time on Thursday, but having to stay at the office till midnight on Friday because the boss finally got around to giving you that project...at 4:30pm.
Waste; activities that your customer doesn't value and doesn't want to pay for; e.g., billing your customer for the really expensive 10am FedEx delivery because you didn't finish the document on time.
Unthinking waste.
Don't be surprised if I run with the deity idea!
Here's a key point I've been thinking about -- one I'll probably blog about myself: We have a mental image of corporations naturally pursuing efficient (i.e. market-driven) behavior, but in fact large organizations are as much bureaucratic as they are market-driven, and so there are many pockets of inefficient behavior.
E-mail is a big one. It's not unlike the energy-efficiency steps that companies *don't* take because . . . well, because they're run by humans and they just *don't*.
This entry from the Climate Progress blog talks about how Dow Chemical, working under an enlightened efficiency manager, made great strides in that area, saving millions of dollars -- but then stopped doing it when the manager retired:
http://climateprogress.org/2008/07/25/energy-efficiency-part-2-the-limitless-resource/
We do dumb things like this all the time -- but we don't call ourselves on it.