The Productivity of Inefficiency

Addiction is insidious. It creeps up on us, starting benignly and developing to a point where we can no longer do without whatever it is that started innocently enough.

We have allowed and enabled efficiency to become addictive. It started in a burst of excitement with Adam Smith and his observations on a pin factory, and was so productive it really got into its stride with Frederick W. Taylor and scientific management. By the late twentieth century we had an an effective network of pushers in a thriving body of consultancy, who refined it into the early twentieth century with clever packaging in a range of attractive presentations from Business Process Re-engineering and Lean Six Sigma, and then legitimised it with a mantra of the primacy of shareholder value.

Addiction, unchecked, eventually consumes its host, and here we are. Instead of bottles and syringes scattered about in dark corners, we see different evidence. Working lunches as standard. Hollow eyed commuters at 5:30 am and 10…