Sunday, May 31, 2009

Process vs progress - when the process gets in the way

I loved this article on internal process. The author describes a situtation I encountered numerous times in previous positions - the use of bureaucratic processes to prevent real work from being performed.

I worked on a team of designers and researchers that did internal consulting jobs and research for a large company. The group elevated bureaucratic process for approving work requests to an art form. The owners of the approval process used this innovation-crushing process to prevent work from being performed that didn't benefit them personally, and to steer work into their own pet projects. The team lost a lot of talented people because of it.

Kudos to Harold Sirkin for highlighting an insidious practice.

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