Why being an efficiency freak Is a one-way ticket to boresville

For decades, businesses, tech wizards, and even governments have been absolutely obsessed with efficiency—chasing it like a hyperactive squirrel on espresso. Trim this, optimize that, squeeze every last drop of juice from the lemon until the lemon files a restraining order. But here’s the hilarious thing nobody bothered to ask: Do actual people even like efficiency that much? Spoiler: not really.

These days, many big-shot companies have quietly stopped making cool stuff people actually want. Instead, the top dogs spend their days cooking up fairy tales about efficiency to whisper into the ears of financial analysts—those spreadsheet wizards who couldn’t tell a winning business from a potato wearing a necktie, so long as the numbers look pretty.

You don’t need to prove your genius cost-slashing idea works in the messy real world.

You just have to make it sound convincingly econ-flavored. It’s become the golden rule of corporate survival: no matter how galactically stupid your decision turns out to be, you’re safe as houses so long as you followed the holy scriptures of Economics—a prediction tool roughly as accurate as asking a magic eight-ball or interpreting the dance moves of a particularly enthusiastic jellyfish.

The Quad-Play Fiasco: Four Scoops of Meh

Consider the miraculous invention called "quad-play." The high priests of economics decreed that every mobile company must also peddle broadband, landlines, and pay TV—while TV companies must bundle phones, internet, and landlines right back. The logic? Smoosh everything together and—abracadabra—back-office efficiencies, economies of scale, and pricing voodoo! The cheapest bundle beast would rule them all!

Reality check: quad-play is about as exciting as a sandwich filled with warm lettuce. Humans didn't evolve to gleefully place all their precious eggs in one extremely droppable basket. Miss one payment on that eye-gouging $250 roaming charge from Zurich? Boom! One company switches off your phone, internet, TV, and landline in a single click. And honestly, who wakes up thinking, “Gee, I’d love a single monthly bill that screams exactly how much I’m hemorrhaging on everything”?

Has business abandoned its traditional and socially valuable function, where competing firms experimented with different ideas for satisfying customers, allowing the market to judge the results?

At times it feels as though it has been replaced by a kind of monotheistic religion devoted to efficiency, where, so long as you can recite approved management mantras about economies of scale and cost reduction to financial overlords, no one asks any further questions.

Premium-priced products frequently achieve large market shares, as those same financial analysts might have realized had they reached into their pockets for an iPhone or picked up the keys to a Mercedes. Yet, to them, it seemed more important for a company to behave in a way that aligned with economic theory than to succeed in delivering a superior product to millions of customers.

The Great Telephony Mystery

This very year, a company I know (don't ask) yanked every single employee worldwide—a couple thousand souls across multiple countries—onto a shiny new phone system in a single chaotic week. The new system's main job? Making and receiving calls. Its actual performance? Think two tin cans connected by a wet noodle. Anguished cries erupted: dreadful wait times, calls dropping like dead flies, audio quality resembling a ghost trapped in a wind tunnel. Yet nobody ever offered a peep of explanation. And the kicker? Zero testing. Not a single experiment to see if productivity might nosedive.

Why? Because productivity was never the point. The real mission was a bedtime story called “IT Savings Through Global Consolidation,” tailor-made to make analysts swoon. A cost-cutting move implemented with zero thought about hidden chaos? Alarming, and weirdly ideological. Isn’t rigid ideology supposed to be communism's embarrassing party trick, not capitalism’s?

In Praise of Lucky Ding-Dongs

Here’s a juicy little secret free-market cheerleaders don’t mention much: capitalism doesn’t care about your brilliant reasoning. In fact, it often showers riches on clueless goofballs who tripped into success. You can have an IQ the size of a cashew but stumble into the perfect market niche at just the right second—and jackpot! Meanwhile, you can be armed with every fancy MBA mankind ever invented, launch your genius plan a year too soon or too late, and watch it all crash gloriously.

To the intellectually snooty, this seems criminally un-meritocratic. But that’s exactly what makes markets wonderfully bonkers: they happily reward whatever works, no matter how dopey the thinking behind it. Sure, maybe nobody “deserves” luck, but scrub away fortunate accidents and you kill the magic. Evolution runs on happy accidents. A business world that propped up zombie restaurants with subsidies because someone made a clever argument? That'd be a recipe for lousy dinner and economic indigestion.

Efficiency, Schmefficiency

Conventional wisdom swears free markets exist to maximize efficiency. But honestly? Markets are about as efficient as a toddler organizing a sock drawer. Praising capitalism for efficiency is like praising a cat for its ability to fetch—heartfelt but completely missing the point. Competition is supposed to be messy, chaotic, and profoundly inefficient. That’s the whole glorious point.

The secret ingredient missing from the efficiency cult is good old-fashioned, semi-random wild experimentation. Truly free markets gleefully trade smooth efficiency for weird, luck-soaked innovation. Consumer capitalism’s greatest hits were rarely planned—they just sort of… happened. Did anyone properly test offshoring call centers to cheaper countries? Nope. It just became the hot trend, swept along by a giddy cost-cutting conga line. Today, the same giddy rush is happening with AI, cheerfully hyped as the ultimate human-replacing efficiency machine.

Turns out, chasing efficiency like a headless chicken might just be the least efficient thing we’ve ever done. Whoops.