Keeping what matters in focus is challenging for any organization, especially with the forces at play as a company grows. “Now that we’re a much larger company, it’s been a challenge to keep the various parts of the company focused on the customer benefit,” says Intuit founder Scott Cook. “It’s so tempting for parts of the organization to start looking at other things. In our kind of business, you get all this data about ‘conversions’ and ‘retention,’ and so on. We got seduced by that.” It is, to be sure, easier to focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness. Most businesses are very, very
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The Taylorist designs of our standard business processes and computer programs is to compute efficiency. To get to effectiveness, you have to break the mold of things you have embedded in your assumptions and in software.
