How much waste is incurred from not listening to frontline workers who know about problems/bottleneck and instead enact policy from clueless higher ups, or the proverbial “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, or the “strategic” decisions based on politics/the CEO’s gut feeling…
Just as people are very good at voting against their interests, businesses are very good at enacting (or keeping) policies that go against profitability/retention/efficiency.
But an employee saying "hey boss, we should do this differently" is something different from "here's a bunch of studies that show you save 10% on average if you do it that way". Your employee could be wrong, or their suggestion would only work with them specifically because they're very talented at sliding with their forklift etc.
Unless there's some conspiracy going on, we should see someone change the policy, get significant returns, and either outcompete the others, or at least have a higher profit, which should lead to investors pressuring other CEOs to also adopt the new, better systems. Like Just In Time production did, surely there was some guy who said "no, I prefer to have my year's worth of supplies in my storage on site", but they'd have much higher capital requirements and would be very inflexible for virtually no upside (supply chain breakdowns are rare).
How much waste is incurred from not listening to frontline workers who know about problems/bottleneck and instead enact policy from clueless higher ups, or the proverbial “the beatings will continue until morale improves”, or the “strategic” decisions based on politics/the CEO’s gut feeling…
Just as people are very good at voting against their interests, businesses are very good at enacting (or keeping) policies that go against profitability/retention/efficiency.