Four Paths to a Focused

Four paths to a focused organization

How to rein in complexity, eliminate swirl and build a company that can get things done.

By Mark Gottfredson and Michael C. Mankins

Four paths to a focused organization

Mark Gottfredson is a partner with Bain & Company in Dallas and a senior member of the Global Performance Improvement practice. Michael C. Mankins leads Bain & Company’s Organization practice in the Americas and is a partner in San Francisco.

Copyright © 2013 Bain & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Four paths to a focused organization

At a large natural-resources company, hiring a new general manager for a mine required the involvement of three human resources professionals, four regional leaders and two executives from corporate. Getting all these people to agree on a new hire typically took months. In the meantime, positions sat open and promising candidates were snapped up by fastermoving competitors. At a global energy company, senior executives relied on their own functions to gather data to support key decisions. The requests led to countless hours of uncoordinated work throughout the organization, hundreds of different reports and many more hours reconciling the reports’ conflicting or inconsistent information. By the time executives got the data, it was often out of date. When they requested an update, the process started all over again. Nearly every large company has troubling stories like these—bureaucracies running wild, decisions getting stuck in the swamp, G&A costs spiraling out of control. They’re all manifestations of creeping organiza-

tional complexity, one of the most toxic ailments a company can experience. Unchecked complexity in an organization demoralizes employees, slows innovation and raises costs. We have found that people in many companies spend 25% or more of their time on lowvalue or inefficient activities. If you could get rid of all that unproductive work, you could gain the equivalent of 10 hours more a week...