Let me start with what the smart people at Merriam-Webster say efficiency is:
> Efficiency: The ability to do something or produce something without wasting materials, time, or energy.
Sounds good, right? very simply put, efficiency means doings things right.
The Efficiency Trap (Why Your personal Car Is a Failure)
You probably have a car, and maybe, its a very nice car, might be an expensive car, might be the latest or maybe its one of those environment friendly electric cars.
And that you own, sits idle in some parking space at your home, or office or at a shopping mall for how long everyday? 22 hours? maybe you have a longer communte, 20 hour?
For 20 hours that otherwise very nice car, just sits there, idling, doing absolutely nothing and producing absolutely no value.
If a person was to site idle doing absolutely nothing for 20 hours everyday, societey would label him lazy and a waste.
So how do we solve this problem. we should uber out the car while we dont use it, rent it out, or just keep driving constantly. That would acheive 100% efficiency and we would win the game.
But that sounds insane. Well that's because it is insane.
Peter Drucker, the management guy everyone quotes, said it best:
> "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
What happens if the smartest guy in the room gets do the stupidest task. The stupidity is carried out most effectively.
Efficiency vs. Effectiveness
Here's what you need to know:
> Effectiveness: The degree to which something is successful in producing a desired result.
Efficiency is about doing things right.
Effectiveness is about doing the right things.
You can be super efficient at checking emails, perhaps you are even the best in the whole world, the Greatest of all time at checking your inbox, but unless those emails mean something, unless they provide value, you are just wasting your efficiency.
Now i'll give you 2 examples, and one of them is correct, and i wont tell you which one is.
Steve Jobs made Apple great by saying "yes" to a 1000 things and doing them very efficiently. He was the most efficient. That's the whole game.
Steve Jobs made Apple great by saying "no" to a 1,000 things so he could focus on the few things that actually mattered. He was the most effective. That's the whole game.
Now I said wont tell you which one is correct but it's the second one. If you picked first, dont worry, what we are discussing today can be counter-intuitive, and that's exactly why we are discussing it.
The 100% Efficiency Myth
Let's go back to that car and let's say you actually do it. You get that car to 100% efficiency.
How long before it breaks down? In all probablity, you will not even be able to reach the point of breaking down because the engine would heat up before that, or you'll need to refuel or switch drivers and all of these would affect efficiency and rendering the experiment a failiure.
Same with you. The logical conclusion to trying to be 1005 efficient is working at full capacity for 24 hours everyday. You wont make it far doing that.
Value is the most important
value is everything.
Nobody ever failed because they were inefficient. Think about it. Show me someone that did the right things, but went bankrupt because they took too many coffee breaks. It doesn't happen.
Companies and people fail when they lose touch with what people want.You cant deliver value to someone unless you know what they want. When you start to make things nobody needs, or make them so badly that people run away, you fail.
Let's look at blockbuster, they were very efficient at what they did. they even had a big supply chain, had stores everywhere but they failed to realise that people wanted to watch movies at home without leaving the couch to rent and then return the tapes.
Netflix sweeped in and now we all watch Netflix.
Ask yourself this, why did Netflix come out on top? did Netflix do things right, or did they do the right thing.
Note that efficiency and effectiveness arent mutually exclusive. That's not the lesson here.
Or look at Kodak. The best in the world at making film. When people turned to digital, Kodak still insisted on film.
Kodak even had the technology first but didn't use it because they were too busy being efficient at the wrong thing. and the market responded, they are gone now.
Jeff Bezos talks about being "customer obsessed" at Amazon. Customer obsessed. Because if you're giving people what they want, if you're creating real value, the efficiency stuff works itself out.
The Takeaway
Ask yourself: Am I doing the right things? Am I creating value? Am I giving people what they actually want and need?
If the answer is yes, great. Keep doing that.
Your car doesn't need to run all day. You don't need to work all night. What you need is to do things that matter, things that create real value for real people.
Be effective first. The efficiency will follow because you were doing the right things all along.
That's it. That's the whole game.