Stop Perfecting the Wrong Work
Peter F. Drucker, the Austrian-born American consultant and author often called the father of modern management, once said something that should unsettle any team that feels productive because every box on the metrics page is checked: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” He wrote it in a 1963 Harvard Business Review essay that asked executives to put effectiveness before efficiency and to stop polishing work that does not move the business. The quote holds up because it describes a real habit. Companies reward action. Customers reward outcomes. When those diverge, efficiency becomes camouflage for futility.
Effectiveness and efficiency describe different problems. Efficiency concerns execution. It asks how to reduce time, errors, and cost once a choice has been made. Effectiveness concerns choice. It asks which problems deserve attention, which customers matter most, and where profit pools are forming. When leaders invert that order, they create a machine that runs beautifully in the wrong direction. The tell is simple. People talk about throughput and cycle time while share, margin, or retention drifts the wrong way. The organization is improving a process that should be retired or rebuilt, and every improvement makes the commitment harder to reverse.
Data helps reveal this pattern, but it can also cause it. Economists call it Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target it stops being a good measure. In September 2016, regulators fined Wells Fargo a total of $185 million after investigators found employees had secretly opened more than two million deposit and credit card accounts to meet aggressive sales targets, with $100 million from the CFPB, $35 million from the OCC, and $50 million to the Los Angeles City Attorney. Over several years the bank terminated about 5,300 employees tied to these practices. Oversight then escalated. In February 2018 the Federal Reserve imposed an asset cap until Wells Fargo improved governance and risk controls, and in 2020 the Department of Justice announced a $3 billion resolution of criminal and civil probes into the sales practices. The lesson is not that measurement is bad. The lesson is that proxies bend behavior, so leaders must protect the outcome the proxy stands for and be ready to retire the proxy the moment it distorts decisions.
Drucker offered a practice most firms avoid because it is uncomfortable. He called it systematic abandonment. On a fixed cadence, make everything you do re-earn the right to exist. Products, reports, standing meetings, approval gates, training modules, even automation projects. Ask two questions: Would we start this today? What result would justify its continuation this quarter? If the case is weak, stop or shrink it. Put the review on the calendar, run it the same way every time, and move on. Keep a short abandonment ledger that lists what ended, why it ended, and what capacity returned to the portfolio. People copy what leaders praise. When endings are praised, the organization learns to treat subtraction as strategy.
In product work, start with simplicity as a hard limit. Map the path end to end and strike any step that does not change the customer’s result or reduce risk. Build the smallest thing a real user can succeed with and test it in the wild. Keep what works, delete the rest, then add capacity. Do not automate until you have removed the waste, because automation preserves whatever it touches. Before you speed anything up, ask one question: what decision will this result let us make that we cannot make today? If there is no answer, pause.
Look at Kodak. It mastered film chemistry and processing while customers moved to digital capture, editing, and sharing. A Kodak engineer built a digital camera in 1975, yet the company kept anchoring growth to paper prints and retail labs. BlackBerry nailed secure mobile email as demand shifted to full-screen apps and touch-first devices. Both firms executed well, but their bets pointed at shrinking pools of value. Excellence in the wrong contest still loses.
Start by naming the few bets you will back over the next two years: which customers, which problems you will solve for them, which offers you will build, and the capabilities that make those offers work. Use that list to steer budgets, hiring, and calendars. If a project does not support those bets, pause it or close it. Before approving anything new, run a simple premortem: assume it failed and write down why. If the reasons point to a weak premise, do not start. Build measures that track outcomes customers would recognize, and change or remove those measures when they begin to warp behavior. Keep a short log of what you stopped and where the freed time and money went. The log makes priorities visible and keeps drift in check.
There is a human layer to all this that matters as much as the mechanics. People take pride in craft. They will pour skill into whatever sits in front of them. If leadership does not curate the work, the organization will perfect the convenient rather than the consequential.Make clarity visible in roadmaps, hiring plans, and budgets. Cut tasks that once served a purpose and now waste time. State priorities in the room. When someone proposes to improve a process, start with one question: Does this deserve to exist? If no, stop and redeploy the people. If yes, commit to doing it well and let efficiency compound the result.
Take Drucker’s point as operating guidance. Decide what matters before you accelerate. Measure outcomes customers would recognize. Prune on a schedule. Do not pave a cow path you plan to leave behind. Execution quality still counts, but only after the choice is right. Keep the sequence intact: choose, then improve. That is the everyday test of leadership and the surest way to turn work into results.