See Oscar Berg’s post “Did You Ever Hear anyone Shout ‘Culture Failure’?” on his weblog, The Content Economy.

A culture failure is much more alarming and also much more uncomfortable than a simple process or technology failure. It signals that something is fundamentally wrong, something which is very complex and hard to change. It means that you not only have to change your own attitudes and behaviors, but also those of your colleagues, including management. You might need to change the entire incentive model, which in the end determines the bonus of your CEO. What is worse, you most likely also need to change the attitudes and behaviors of your CEO (“Impossible!”).

Originally referred by Henrik Mårtensson on Twitter.

See Henrik Mårtensson’s “The Cost of Queues” on how an extreme focus on “cost effectiveness” can damage an organization. (Thanks to Jack Vinson for the referral on his blog “Knowledge Jolt with Jack.”)

If you try to become more cost effective by reducing capacity, and thereby capacity cost, all will be well at first, from an economic point of view. (The people who are let go are usually of a different opinion.) The catch is that this will increase the queues in the system. This increases lead times. Consequently, cost associated with lead time will also increase. (In manufacturing there is also a considerable storage cost due to increased inventory, but we will ignore that for the purposes of this blog post.)