Chasing Nickels Around Dollar Bills
Categories: Company Management
Picture an exec sending out yet another memo about how careful everyone needs to be with how they use office supplies. Excess paper and pens are costly, it reminds you. Then you notice that the memo comes from the boss's cousin, whose only responsibility (for which he earns six figures) is sending out this kind of memo. How many post-its do we need to save in order to pay that guy's salary?
The idea here is that an organization is focused on trimming costs for small, relatively innocuous stuff, while at the same time ignoring huge money-sucking black holes (like the salary for the boss's useless cousin).
