Too big to succeed ...

Size matters. Especially in terms of organizational efficiency. 

After a certain point, the larger an organization grows the more inefficient it becomes.

A perfect example is our own government and the myriad programs it supposedly manages.  Spending keeps going up and up as it gets more and more inefficient. Nobody is really managing it because it’s now essentially unmanageable. 

There are untold layers upon layers of departments and agencies that exist in a virtual vacuum, fully staffed with well-paid government employees, chugging along day after day, doing only God knows what perhaps for reasons that may have long passed. They thrive, nonetheless.

Nobody really knows what they’re doing. Or even why they still exist.

Congress always seems to be making more of them. More agencies. More special offices.  More committees with additional support staff.  More “boards” of this or that, like the one charged with insuring that goods claiming to be made by Native Americans really are.  Congress and regulators always think adding more people and spending more will make things better. 

Of course it doesn’t.  It’s only making things worse, and government more inefficient and less accountable at every level.     

Just about anybody who has ever worked in a large corporation knows that bulking up doesn’t always make an organization better.  Quite the contrary, most often.

As the workforce expands, nobody wants to share resources with any other group. They want their own accounting people, their own IT folks, their own tech-support personnel, their own customer-facing reps. Before long, they’ve brought redundancy and spending to new heights.

The bigger issue is that many group leaders start seeing their most important role as protecting the resources and headcount they’ve built.

Resources and headcount must be constantly justified to avoid cuts.  Everybody must appear so busy they can’t possibly be cut.  In the absence of real meaningful work, meetings proliferate, task forces are created, work is subdivided so much that individual workers are increasingly distanced from the organization’s customers.

Everybody is “overwhelmed.” Too busy to take on anything else. The solution? Increase budgets to add more people to lighten the load. That’s how organizational bloat and fat come about.      

With more people and departments in the mix, there are more potential turf wars to overcome. More butts to cover. With more people involved there’s more potential for serious mistakes though ignorance, ineptitude, indifference, laziness, or even sabotage.

That’s why most successful businesses every now and then purge as much redundancy and non-essential personnel as possible. They try to flatten their org charts, reduce superfluous headcount, and at the same time increase accountability at every level.  The goal is to boost efficiency and improve productivity, and, of course, reduce unnecessary cost.

Done properly it’s not just rearranging things – like the deck chairs on the Titanic.  That accomplishes nothing; the bloat is simply reconfigured and moved around while the organization continues to flounder and sink under its own weight. Changing who reports to whom, where offices are located, and designing a new floor plan doesn’t address the underlying problem.   

Objectively reassessing what’s really needed for the organization to succeed and thrive, not just now, but in the future, is what’s needed.  Making the hard decisions on what and who are essential, and then acting on those decisions, is the only way to start solving systemic problems.

Jobs get cut.  Departments eliminated and consolidated. Redundancy is lessened.  The media complain it’s unfair to cut the jobs of so many people who’ve worked there so long. There’s almost never a discussion of whether those employees should have been gone long ago.    

To be candid, streamlining also enables organizations to get rid of troublesome employees, habitual blame shifters, idea killers, slackers, back stabbers, empire builders, and those who spend more time playing office politics than doing their jobs.

Which is also a healthy thing to do. 

That lesson is lost on our government. 

It’s become too big, too complex, to succeed. It employs too many people doing too little, for too much, simply because they are protected by their unions and friends in Congress.  There’s little to no accountability for bad behavior; there’s almost never a consequence for doing their job badly, or even breaking the law – something they’d get fired for anywhere else.

Consequently, our government no longer serves us as much as it serves itself and those employed within it.  Nobody in government worries about losing their job; that feeds their arrogance that no one can touch them, no matter what they do.  That explains why they feel they hold the real keys to power, not elected representatives or even a President. 

Government employees feel protected by the size of government itself. To increase their personal job security, they want government to grow even more. To be more complex. To insulate themselves with more layers. The bigger it gets, the more complex it becomes, the more areas they can hide in. And the less visible – and less accountable – every employee within it becomes.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that most government employees are Democrats; Democrats are always in favor of expanding the size of government.  As are government employee unions.  

But an ever-expanding government bureaucracy is truly dangerous.         

It will only get worse unless someone starts cutting the fat, the bureaucracies, and the non-essential agencies and personnel bogging it down.   

I’m convinced the current government employee base – not counting the military – can easily be reduced by 10-15%, if anyone has the guts to do it. There’s so much unnecessary redundancy, so many superfluous departments, agencies, and “boards” designed to solve problems already solved or problems that aren’t really problems, it wouldn’t be rocket science.

The Federal employee base is just the start. We could also cut the bloated number of contractors – most of whom exist to do the same work current Federal employees should be doing.

If we’re really worried about threats to our security and protecting sensitive classified information, why are we outsourcing so much of that work to contractors to manage our most confidential information? We already have enough security issues with full-time government employees and members of Congress leaking sensitive data to damage those with whom they disagree. Do we really need to add even more vulnerabilities through outside contractors? 

Of course not. Can you say Eric Snowden? 

The easiest way to have better security is to have fewer people in the loop. The easiest way to reduce inefficiency is to have less deadwood and fewer schlagers clogging up the works. 

The easiest way to get a more responsive and manageable government is to make it smaller.

That way there’s more accountability at every level. Fewer places to hide.  And less bureaucratic infighting that drags everything down and stalls decision execution. 

Every top business executive knows this. I’m sure Trump does, too. 

I hope if he gets reelected, he’ll take this on.