Don’t Be Efficient

In the spirit of the anti-advice I published yesterday, here’s another counter-intuitive insight:

If you’re exploring, efficiency shouldn’t be your goal. Efficiency is for black belts; it is not for special operations.

Exploration, by definition, is not efficient. As Paul Graham has famously said, “Do Things That Don’t Scale.” But if you’re not careful, the ubiquitous conditioning of the efficiency-oriented part of the organization will influence your objectives.

A big time tech CEO I know, whose market cap has exploded ~8x in the last 5-6 years, told me he spends 2-3 hours each day meeting founders to expand his feel for the space. He told me, “Somewhere close to 90% of the meetings don’t go anywhere ‘tangible,’ to be honest. It’s probably the most inefficient process in the world, but I don’t mind it. I get lots of valuable insights from it.”

Henrik Werdelin, whom I’ve written about before, shared his routine practice of sending himself emails with interesting ideas. He said, “Sixty percent of the time, I don’t even know what the email means, and I end up trashing it. But that’s not important. I’d much rather err on the side of capturing garbage than missing gold.”

The tension between efficiency and effectiveness is nowhere more painfully felt than in the innovation space. To get to breakthrough outcomes, you really have to put up with a lot of lousy material, too. But as I’ve argued before, it’s impossible to get to the “genius” outcomes without enduring some “goofiness” along the way. Folks have dealt with the embarrassment inherent in the creative process in many ways, but eliminating it completely just isn’t one of the options.

Efficiency is not the goal.

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