Somewhere in the last twenty years, efficiency stopped being a tool and became a worldview. Do more, faster, cheaper. Strip the friction. Automate the rest. It’s such a thoroughly assumed good that the sentence efficiency is not a strategy reads almost as a provocation rather than what it actually is, which is a fairly boring description of what efficiency is for.
What Efficiency Is Actually For
Nick Richtsmeier, whose book The Damn Rules makes this argument at length, puts it about as plainly as it can be put: efficiency is a useful tool for one specific thing, and that thing is waste management. Everything you create generates waste. Systems stop working. Processes accumulate cruft. Things start lurking in corners. You need some way to metabolise all of it and keep moving, and efficiency is how you do that. Think of it as composting.
The trouble starts when composting becomes the point. Very few organisations actually want to be a waste management company, and yet an enormous number of them have made efficiency their core strategy — do as much as we can, as fast as we can, as cheaply as we can. That’s a fine description of a landfill operation. It’s a poor description of anything anyone would choose.
Why Efficiency Is Not a Strategy People Can Love
Here’s the test, and it’s uncomfortable: we appreciate the trash company. We might even leave them a gift card at Christmas. We are not in love with the trash company.
That’s not a slight against waste management. It’s a statement about what efficiency can and can’t produce. Efficiency can produce reliability, margin, speed. It cannot produce attachment. And attachment is what you’re actually asking for when you want customers who stay, employees who lean in, investors who wait out a hard quarter. All of those people are being asked to take an emotional risk on something. Nobody takes an emotional risk on a service that has optimised the humanity out of itself.
This is where the argument stops being about business and starts being about the thing I write about constantly. Efficiency has the same defect as productivity in its most common form: it measures the quantitative and quietly discards the qualitative. It counts what you produced. It has nothing to say about whether producing it was the right thing to do, or whether the producing left anything of you intact.
The Case for Load-Bearing Inefficiency
Nick’s sharper formulation is that inefficiency is load-bearing. Some of the slack in a system isn’t waste at all — it’s the part holding the structure up.
The dinner you host for five people in your network, where everyone brings a friend and commits to introducing each other, is wildly inefficient compared to buying ads. It’s also cheaper, more enjoyable, more within your control, and considerably more likely to produce a client. The conversation that takes thirty seconds longer than it needs to is where someone decides whether you’re worth trusting. The pause before responding is where judgment happens. Strip all of that out in the name of throughput and you’ve removed the load-bearing walls and kept the drywall.
None of which is an argument for being slow on purpose, or for romanticising friction. It’s an argument for knowing which category a given thing belongs in before you optimise it. Waste gets composted. The rest of it — the relationships, the deliberation, the care — is the actual structure, and it doesn’t survive being made efficient.
That’s the distinction underneath Productiveness too: efficacy over efficiency, which is really just a way of asking whether the thing you did well was worth doing at all. Efficiency answers how fast. It has never once answered toward what.
