I once worked for a small company that manufactured electronic connectors. There were about 180 people in the company, and about half of the employees reported to me because I was the manager of manufacturing. The company was the U.S. division of a large French company, and weekly production and financial reports were very important so that the parent company could carefully monitor us.
Because of this, we had a somewhat oversized Information Systems department whose job it was to generate extensive weekly reports. When I say extensive I mean that each report weighed about three pounds and was about 2 to 3 inches thick.
Somehow, the job of distributing the weekly report became the responsibility of my department — perhaps because I had the most employees. Each Monday morning, the IS department would wheel in a stack of about 20 reports for us to deliver to the various departments.
I need to mention here that no one in the IS department ever took the time to explain to me how to understand or use the report. So each week the report would sit on my desk unread until it was replaced the following week with the new one while the old one went into the trash.
I had delegated the job of distributing the reports to one of my people, and each Monday morning he would pick up the reports from my office and distribute them. That usually took about 45 minutes away from the time he could have been actually producing some work.
This went on for several months until one day I suddenly wondered whether I was the only one who didn’t know how to interpret the report or gain any useful information from it. When my guy came in the next Monday morning, I told him to just leave the reports sitting on my office floor and I’d let him know when to distribute them. Then I waited for someone to call me.
Guess what? It wasn’t until Wednesday that I finally got a call from someone in the Purchasing Department asking about their report. I apologized for failing to deliver it and claimed busyness. I had my guy deliver their report. On Tuesday of the following week a few others finally realized that they hadn’t received their report, and we were asked to deliver three or four more.
From then on, we only delivered about five or six of the reports every Monday morning. No one else ever asked for their report and the rest just sat on my office floor until they were replaced the following week by a new batch. Obviously I wasn’t the only one who found no value in the report.
I wonder how many companies waste valuable resources generating worthless information when they could be spending their time much more productively.
— Paul Burri is an entrepreneur, inventor, columnist, engineer and iconoclast. He is not in the advertising business, but he is a small-business counselor with the Santa Barbara chapter of Counselors to America’s Small Business-SCORE. The opinions and comments in this column are his alone and do not represent the opinions or policies of any outside organization. He can be reached at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Click here for previous Paul Burri columns. Follow Paul Burri on Twitter: @BronxPaul
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