These days, everybody seems to be losing their minds about semaglutide, commonly known by one of its commercial names, Ozempic. And it makes sense, it’s easy, relatively safe, and insanely effective to lose weight. But it’s like cutting costs for efficiency; a double-edged sword when the proper considerations haven’t been made.
You don’t want to lose weight
I have nothing against the usage of semaglutide to reduce obesity. On the contrary, I think this could be a revolution to improve the health of millions of people. In essence, what it does is to reduce your appetite. Less food, less calories. Less calories, less weight. Seems logical, right?
Unless you are morbidly obese, the problem is that losing weight may not be what you want. When you shred a lot of weight very quickly, especially if you don’t practice resistance training, it is very likely you are also kissing goodbye to a high percentage of muscle mass. And that can be even worse than keeping the fat and more complicated to fix.
Something very similar happens with the faulty logic behind “Less cost, more efficiency. More efficiency, more success”. The quest for -poorly understood- efficiency is driving reasonably healthy companies crazy. To an extent, most managers are missing an apparently not so obvious point; that what you really want is to succeed and stay in business, not to cut costs. The old good mistaking the ends with the means.
And targeting the wrong goals can be fatal. Especially when pressure pushes people to meet them as Deming warned us a few decades ago: “People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets – even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it“.
And I get it. Cutting costs by default is tremendously tempting. It is easy and produces very concrete short-term results with your name on them, while the eventual consequences of your cost-saving decisions will show up much later, when responsibilities are fuzzy and impacts hard to objectively measure.
Even if it goes terribly wrong, you just chin up, raise your index finger and go “I did what I had to do at the moment to save the company”. However, no unhealthy amount of fake dignity can hide the fact that resorting to senseless cost-cutting is the first play in the book of the lazy, spineless, and incompetent managers.
Does that mean we should not reduce unnecessary cost? Hell, no! Unnecessary is the key word here.
You want to be healthier
To me, the goal is to be healthier. I’m past forty now, injuries have not been kind, life happened, and at this point, it would be nice if I shredded some pounds of fat, but I’m happy because my chronic injuries are under control thanks to the muscles that I still keep. That’s priority number one.
Your company surely suffers from some pain points too; some chronic injuries, let’s say. If it is still successfully running, I am sure there are also some critical systems supported by key individuals and tools, that help mitigate those injuries and produce value. A kind of organizational muscle holding everything together, making things work, and preventing new problems from appearing. You know who they are and you are thinking of some right now.
When it comes to optimizations and efficiencies, managers tend to aim first at the systems that produce the most value. After all, those are the critical ones. Unfortunately, these “optimizations“ frequently include reducing those critical systems’ budgets to make them more efficient at the expense of their effectiveness. A simple matter of priorities that will likely end up harming those systems beyond repair.
My take is to opt for a Hippocratic approach; first, do no harm. Instead of skimping on critical systems, focus on reducing unnecessary cost. Try identifying the less valuable systems, those that serve a questionable purpose, or no purpose at all, and minimize risks of impacting your organizational muscle. Sometimes, you may find those low-value systems can be quickly removed, but in others, it might be a slower process. Usually, it requires more effort. It always pays off, regardless.
“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” as Peter Drucker said.
I can hear the Lean guys yawning from here, but trust me, some people need to read this.
You still have to eat
Still, it doesn’t matter how much money you try to save, you will never operate at zero cost. You have to spend in order to stay in business, the same way you have to eat to stay alive. It’s nonnegotiable; so make it count.
As I said before, my goal is to be healthier. Don’t expect me to win the next Arnold Classic. However, in a competitive and unstable market where companies are obsessed with losing weight, who do you think will win? The ones that are nothing but skin and bones, or the ones that took care of their bodies and stayed strong? The ones that prioritized cutting corners or the ones that prioritized effectiveness?
When the dust settles, which type of organization do you want to be?