Value Erosion in Large Organizations Caused by Mental Laziness Across Groups

‘Mental Laziness’ -the key destroyer of Value in Organizations and Systems

The concept of ‘Value’ has been intriguing me for sometime now. This is the first post of the ‘Value’ series. In the forthcoming posts, I will try to explore the aspect of ‘Value’ from the standpoint of work, business, and life in general. Your comments are most welcome.

A lot of non-value adding activities that one does or one is compelled to do can be attributed to the mental laziness of the individual or to the system that the individual is a part of.

The consequences of a system’s ‘mental laziness’ can be very far-reaching negatively, as its influence could be on a number of individuals who are part of the system.

I have coined this phrase ‘mental laziness’ to differentiate it from the word ‘laziness’ that we all understand. For example, once in a while one may feel lazy to get up early in the morning to go for the routine morning walk. However, this would not deter the person from focusing on his/her work, or reduce their enthusiasm in life overall. On the other hand ‘mental laziness’ arises from a lack of focus or from a lack of inner drive to do something worthwhile.

Large and successful organizations often become victims of this syndrome, especially since they have the financial muscle and redundancy in the system to sustain non value adding activities. The first signs of this degeneration become evident in the support functions. However, the interesting and unfortunate aspect of this degeneration is that it is imperceptible, and before one realizes, it spreads to the other functions and departments.

Let us take the example of a typical organization that makes its transition from a small entity to a large conglomerate.

Each and every individual in a start –up/small organization will be in the limelight with respect to the value that they are adding to their organization. In certain cases, employees may have to go beyond their realms of expertise, and morph into...