The causes of waste often have their roots in character weaknesses; the cures require a change of mind and heart.

Many of the articles in Leadership Excellence deal, either directly or indirectly, with the issue of waste-waste of natural, human, physical, and financial resources.

The topic, then, is often on my mind. Once you acquire an eye, an ear, a nose and a taste for waste, you begin to sense it everywhere. After a while, you even dare to talk about it openly-and that’s when the skeletons come out of the closet.

For example, when my family gathered one year for Christmas, I was reunited with my 94-year-old grandfather and 70-year old father. We saw on television the scattered wreckage of the ill-fated Pan-Am Flight 103; 84 more bodies had just been discovered in the rubble of Lockerbie, Scotland.

We started to talk about the waste of life and resources. The conversation began with the news event but eventually covered the century. We shared stories of the World Wars, of national politics, business, industry; tales of greed, blind ambition, foolish ventures, poor judgment, short-sighted decisions.

“The sad thing,” said my grandfather, after our prolonged discussion, “is that we don’t seem to learn from the past.”

In this country, he suggested, we keep making the same mistakes. People are dispensable; all other resources are disposable. We’re addicted to the easy, the quick, the sensual. Waste is a way of life; shocking examples hardly even get our attention anymore.

Still, I’m shocked by Armand Feigenbaum’s statement: “Forty percent of what we pay for in some products is for the waste imbedded in them.”

Waste, finally, is why I left corporate America. It assumed various forms: wholesale misuse of human talent; massive layoffs; exploitation of some workers, especially women; forced early retirement of many valuable older workers; the spoiling of the environment; the pampering of newly recruited MBAs.

The prostitute attitude that for eight hours “they can have my body, sometimes my mind, but never my heart and soul” breeds waste-as does sin, sloth, war, poor quality-because it all means deviation, defect, destruction, rework. Some would argue that waste is an inevitable byproduct of “organization.” And perhaps to a degree it’s true. But the best leaders and organizations go to great lengths to eliminate waste.

Today’s leaders must have supreme wisdom to detect and correct wasteful practices. Appearances can be misleading. To know the difference between waste and worth, a leader must use all five senses: waste has a certain smell, sound, touch, taste and look-disguise, camouflage and masquerade notwithstanding.

Great leaders not only get the most from available resources, they re-create, reinvent, reawake, renew, empower and transform resources. The leader, after all, is in the best position to eliminate or proliferate wasteful practices-to make the organization more fit, profitable and fruitful or more indulgent, ineffective, barren.

High Costs of White-Collar Waste

Yes, there is waste in production and support services, but more often than not, these incidences are relatively minor infractions. The “folks on the floor” and the “support staff” in the office, living on tight budgets, rarely waste all that much; to the contrary, they save coupons, seek rebates, look for discounts, shop sales, buy material and make it themselves. And they believe in maintenance: they recover, refinish, paint, lubricate, fix up and clean up.

Real, industrial-strength waste is found in the mismanagement or misuse of things and people-in the white-collar areas of the organization.

Things. Talk “off the record” with any seasoned professional about wasteful practices, and you’ll likely get an earful of horror stories-tales from the dark side of the organization about the massive waste of such things as paper and computers, fuel and vehicles, time and money, all squandered and swept under the rug or written off the books.

Sensitivity to such waste is sometimes regarded as old-fashioned, small-minded, or as “penny wise and pound foolish.” I’ve seen executives excuse themselves-even blink at or boast of-Pentagon-size waste and scandal in the name of “big thinking” and “wheeling and dealing” and “playing in the big leagues.”

I say, balderdash. But, granted, I was born and raised in a conservative household. My parents, rationed tightly during World War II, made sure we made full use of our limited resources. Pants were patched; food scraps were saved; shoes were resoled; bath water, electric lights, and especially dollars were metered out. In the sixties, my teenage years, as I worked summers in Zion and Yellowstone National Parks. There I experienced first-hand the silent economy of nature in stark contrast to the noisy gluttony of man. I also worked for Pacific Fruit & Produce, and witnessed there tremendous waste of those precious commodities; indeed, it seemed to me that in America we eat only “the heart of the melon.”

Of course, waste is not confined to our borders. My two years in Argentina, seeing the monuments of waste erected by Juan and Eva Peron, taught me that nobody does waste better than a dictator. But while each country and culture has its own special brand of waste, no country quite compares to the U.S.A. in the volume of waste-be it nuclear, chemical or clerical; indeed, our “dumps” are legendary.

People. Again, I’m troubled when I see on TV the waste of human life, whether depicted in murder, rape, or bad management. Of course, we try to downplay such waste-cover it up, sweep it under the rug, forget to report it. Rarely do we count the total costs, especially in human terms. I suppose, for example, that we under-estimate, by a factor of one million, the real costs of divorces and drugs, miscarriages and abortions: all the “accidents” and damaged relationships. There’s a big difference between pruning and ruining, both in agriculture and corporate culture.

Anyone who has read the reports of J. Peter Grace and his Commission on Government Waste, should lose at least one night’s sleep. As a young professional working in marketing with General Dynamics aerospace, I tossed and turned many nights as I saw, over a four-year period, the colossal waste of human resources built into the structure and systems of the organization and the industry: the waste of words, ideas, potential; entire legions of engineers let go; misdirected proposals and presentations; raw ego and ambition; the sign on the copy machine, “If you want to see the dead return to life, come back at five o’clock.”

Causes of Waste

Most incidences of chronic waste, I believe, have their root causes in attitudes and beliefs-these then become evident in individual judgments, decisions and actions and, finally become institutionalized in the culture, structure and systems of an organization and industry.

Among the attitudinal causes of waste of concern to me are the following:

• “there’s plenty more where this came from”-that thinking can lead to indulgence and excess as well as wipe out precious resources and endanger some species, including man;
• “not my responsibility” or “out of my jurisdiction”-the excuse of military or any bureaucracy, as if one’s moral and professional duty could somehow be outlined with red tape;
• “it’s only human”-this one tries to excuse major character weakness as manifest in sin, sloth, pride, ambition, blind faith and raw zeal;
• “kill the bastards”-this attitude, found everywhere from basketball courts to board rooms, sparks contention, argument, war, fight, discord, anger, strife, legal battles;
• “we’re going in style”-carried to an extreme, this one elevates status to a supreme value and makes anything as old as yesterday out of fashion;
• “what do the numbers tell us”-nothing against numbers, but we need to ask, “what does my heart tell me?”
• “the fools will never know”-this one breeds distrust, disrespect, deception, darkness and detours;
• “why try to trim waste in this company?”-with a little thought, you may come up with several compelling answers to that small question…unless low self-esteem, lost identity, and poor morale and resignation are blocking your vision;
• “let’s add water to our product, fluff to our public relations”-fine, but it leads to “vaporware” and lies.

Cures of Waste

There are outstanding men -and just about all women-are finding cures for the cancer of waste. The cures, curiously, can be found in many different places:

• in education and training
• in order and obedience
• in quality and productivity
• in open systems
• in ethical conduct

Great leaders make gardens of waste places, restore and rebuild people. Christ fed the 5,000 with five loaves and then gathered up 12 baskets of crumbs-now that’s real economy. Edwards Deming, the  Father of the Quality Evolution , who passed away in 1993 - a modern-day Isaiah, told management they can do the same if they work with faith to improve quality.

From the mouth of Deming and other “prophets,” I hear the warnings, the “wo unto him” who-

• wastes the days of his probation (time)
• wastes human life and animal flesh (meat)
• wastes the harvests of the field (fruit)
• wastes the human resources (people)

I invite you to listen, to check what’s going down the drain and out the door with the trash; what’s being spilled, left over, misused, neglected, mistaken; what’s being burned in the incinerator and ground up in the disposal-you may just find some of the prime minds and time, meat and potatoes, fruit and produce, people and things of the organization.

While I hope this warning will make a difference, I fear that like Ebenezer Scrooge, some executives will have to be visited in the night by the ghosts of corporate past, present and future before they change their wasteful ways.

Ken Shelton, Editor, Leadership Excellence

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Leadership Excellence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.