Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff
via fastcompany.com
One of the most difficult things for any organisation to do is “get rid of the crappy stuff”. It’s essential though: most organisations generate ideas that become new products and services. Without a process to prune off the crappy ones, an organisation ends up spending so much time and money trying to fix them, and not enough fostering the good ones.
The Peter Principle says that people are promoted to a point of incompetence - once they’re incompetent, they’re not promoted anymore. Letting this go to its logical conclusion, everyone at the top is incompetent. Obviously this isn’t the case - not everywhere anyway.
I think there’s a similar law of products and services. Crappy stuff eventually takes over organisations. They spend so much time on them, trying to fix them, that the crappy stuff becomes what they do. They become defined by crap.
Again, like the Peter Principle, this doesn’t happen all the time. Just like some people know where to stop, and some leaders recognise qualities in their staff and reward them where they are; there are some leaders who are editors, who can recognise the crappy stuff and get rid of it.