Today I would like to talk about the value of time. Everyone knows the saying that “Time is money”, and for anyone who works for a living, there’s no arguing that. That said, it is ceaselessly surprising to me how often I engage with people and organizations that will make a conscious choice to do things they know are inefficient, which equals wasting time, which equals wasting money.
Translation: Some people know time is money, and they don’t mind wasting it.
Why people and organizations sometimes willingly choose to do things that they know will cost them money is difficult to understand however, I have a few theories on the subject.
Theory 1:
Cause and effect delay/Out of sight, out of mind
Because the cause and effect relationship associated with inefficiencies are not always immediately obvious, they're easy to miss or underappreciate. I also call this the “out of sight, out of mind” scenario.
Example: In cases where organizations have not properly implemented their design technology, their daily operations, workflows and efforts are peppered with costly inefficiencies. All day, every day, inefficient step by inefficient step organizations are losing money.
In most cases this happens because these organizations have not experienced the benefits and productivity enhancing potential that results from a proper implementation (optimization, education, support, etc.), it's difficult to appreciate the difference. Add to that the fact that the negative impact of not implementing properly doesn’t present itself all at once in an unmistakable way, these organizations have difficulty gauging how inefficient they truly are, and how much time and money is being lost.
Theory 2:
Good enough
Example: Some organizations rationalize that because they didn’t spend money (invest) in their design technology implementation from the start, they’ve saved money. Because these organizations may be technically getting by, they deem that they're doing “good enough”. Add the cause and effect delay factor, and over time, despite having saved money by not properly implementing from the start, their “savings” will soon diminish and the organization will cross over into lost productivity/lost time/most money territory.
Saving a few dollars is easy to measure in a spreadsheet when compared to making the necessary investments up front. This is especially true when it’s difficult to measure the impact and/or lost productivity over time. As with the Cause and Effect scenario, the actual costs associated from not implementing from the start is not something that lands all at once. Therefore again, it’s easy to ignore and easy to rationalize away as having saved money and effectively doing “good enough”. . . . for a while at least . . . .
That bring us to today. What I’m finding today is we're having the same conversations with the same organizations we’ve spoken with in the past about a what a proper implementation is. Keep in mind, these are the same organizations who when we last spoke of the subject, choose not to act and are now coming back to review the options again today. Why is this?
Whether it was the “good enough” or the “out of sight, out of mind” rational they were using in the past to not act on a proper implementation, it seems that reality has finally caught up to them and the inevitable accumulative impact of unrealized productivity has reared its ugly head in the form of lost dollars. Eventually, the eminent productivity losses piles up to an unavoidable and unmistakable problem that must be addressed which results in a new conversations on an old subject.
For these organizations, the solution is for the most part the same today as it was in the past, which is to properly implement the technology to get the greatest potential productivity possible.
Translation: Greater productivity = greater (time) efficiency = greater profitability (e.g. money).
Obviously, we can still help these organizations going forward by assisting them with proper implementation services however, what we can’t do is undo the lost time/productivity/money that they’ve experienced since they initially chose to not properly implement in the first place.
The moral or the story is, the sooner an organization properly implements their design technology, the sooner they can experience high levels or productivity, efficiency and profitability. The longer they wait to implement, the longer they’re losing time and money.
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