Rid Your Organization of Obstacles That Infuriate Everyone

The authors of this piece, both professors at Stanford University, devoted eight years to learning about how leaders serve as trustees of others’ time—how they prevent and remove the organizational obstacles that undermine the zeal, damage the health, and throttle the creativity and productivity of good people. Along the way, they learned that there is both bad and good organizational “friction.”

In this article they focus on addition sickness: the unnecessary rules, procedures, communications, tools, and roles that seem to inexorably grow, stifling productivity and creativity. They show why companies are prone to this affliction and describe how leaders can treat it.

The first step is to conduct a good-riddance review to identify obstacles that can and should be removed. The next is to employ subtraction tools—they list several—to eliminate those obstacles or make it difficult for people to add them in the first place.

The authors show how people and organizations have used these steps to great effect: AstraZeneca, for instance, saved 2 million hours in less than two years by implementing an array of simplification efforts.