Many organizations claim to prize efficiency, agility and simplicity, but habitually overpay for complex solutions that take years to implement. Why?

Part of the answer is the unspoken yet implicit connection between status, budget and headcount.

Human beings are natural status seekers, and in large organizations our relative importance is often measured by our budget allocation and number of underlings (along with our job title).

Naturally then, leading a vast, resource-intensive program has greater cachet than a tiny, tactical one. Ask for some loose change for a small project and you risk seeming trivial, however big the payoff. But $20m for a total re-platforming and you'll be taken seriously. Worse still — spend less than your total annual budget and you'll be punished for it next year.

The net result is that many businesses systematically overlook small projects that could yield immediate customer or business improvements, in favor of Kafkaesque programs with glacial timelines, higher risks and questionable benefits — the very opposite of what they claim to want.

How many large-scale technology, CX, or rebranding initiatives are mandated by rank or protocol, rather than commercial logic or earnest desire for improvement? Not all, of course, but plenty!

See this post on LinkedIn