Doing fast things or doing things fast?

There's a difference between efficiency and effectiveness, mostly in terms of intent.  This was brought home to me recently in a meeting with a business partner.

We discussed several topics that needed the partner's attention.  A person in attendance was building a "to do" list for followup after the meeting.  One by one she went through and checked off things she felt were "finished".  She was obviously very interested in efficiency.  However, I felt that many of the items she felt were "complete" were not well thought out or even done well at all.  In her mind the work was done and she should celebrate how "fast" she got them done.  From my perspective they weren't done at all, and required much more thought and consideration.

That led me to wonder - do we place too much emphasis on efficiency and not enough on effectiveness?  To me, the difference between the two is that efficiency is doing a task with the least amount of effort required to complete it, while effectiveness is doing the right job at the right time with the right amount of resources.  Too often I think we opt for efficiency rather than effectiveness.  Let me give you an example.

I noticed that Ford Motor Company now states it is interested in innovation, so I wrote a short note to the President and CEO, letting him know about our innovation software solutions and processes.  If you are interested you can learn more about those here.  What I received back is a poorly folded form letter written on a dot-matrix (?) printer which "...acknowledge receipt of your correspondence."  The letter further states that "Your correspondence will be forwarded to the appropriate division within Ford Motor Company for handling".  The letter has no signature and says at the bottom, simply, Ford Motor Company.

Now I know Ford must receive thousands of letters a day, but this is a little absurd.  My purpose and message were clearly defined within the letter I sent, and it was directed specifically to a team within Ford working on innovation.  We'll see if there is any additional follow up, but this strikes me as an "efficient" response, not nearly an effective response.

As the title of the post suggests, I think we should evaluate each task and determine - am I working on fast things or working things fast?  If the former, that's ok.  Some tasks and work can be worked quickly to completion.  If you are working things fast, you are probably not living up to expectations down the line from you.  One goal is speed, but other goals include accuracy and completeness.  Don't assume efficiency is all that is required.

Comments

[laurence haughton]

Peter Drucker once defined the difference between efficiency and effectiveness as follows:

Efficiency is doing the job right. Effectivenees is doing the right job right.

His point (of course) was that before doing anything someone needs to decide what's really important and do that right. If it's not the right job you can save time by not doing it at all.