Effectiveness and Efficiency

If you’ve been in SMU classes for a while, you’ll realize that these two words are probably the most overused clichés in management classes.

What are the objectives of operations?

“To be efficient and effective.”

In fact, in our society today, we almost worship efficiency and as a result, we’ve probably become the most efficient people in all of history. But we’re still as lost as ever.

I always like to say: our fruitfulness is not a result our busy-ness. For a lot of us, we tend to believe that being busy means being fruitful with our lives. We tend to think that the busier we are, the more useful we are as human beings and as a result: we’re more fruitful in life.

But if we would take a closer look, a lot of this busy-ness is a result of an inherent need to feel important. For a lot of us, we’re actually very empty people; we’re lost about what we want to do with our lives and we use busy-ness to cover that emptiness.

We’re afraid of having idle time because it diminishes our value in our own eyes, and it allows us to reflect on our emptiness and the fact that we’re actually very lost people; the fact that, unless someone else dictates it for us; we actually don’t know what we’re supposed to do with our lives.

In a company, we’ve studied similar clichés as well; the mission: purpose of a company as well as vision: where the company is heading in the future. I personally find this extremely important, even though they’ve also been overused and under-understood.

Sometimes I can almost hear silent groans when I bring up the mission and vision of Uni-Y. Yes, it’s overused by people who don’t really understand it; but it doesn’t diminish its importance.

When we’re clear about what we want to do with our lives: we can be effective. We can cut off excess fats in our schedule. We start interpreting what is important, and what isn’t. If you were sure about that, I bet today you can cut off 90% of your daily activities and classify them as unimportant.

I believe that when we do that, we’ll begin to see that we actually do have a lot of time for ourselves, our families, our relationships, and time to pursue our passions.

In fact, 50 years from now, we probably would forget about the dramas we watched, the computer games we played, the hours we spent running projects that simply kept us busy. Most of us would probably be looking back at all the wasted time because we were just .. groping around in the dark.

So anyway, my point is: there’s no point trying to be efficient doing 10 things at once when inherently, we don’t know where we’re going. We must first figure out our purpose, our direction before we start filling our schedule with activities. We can then strive to be.. effective AND efficient.