These aren’t mere gripes. They are evidence of a fundamental disconnect in incentives. Employees in market-facing roles know that if they fail to satisfy user needs, they’ll get fired by their customers. Corporate staffers, by contrast, can only be fired by their overlords, so that’s where their loyalties lie. Internal administrators suffer little or no penalty when they inflate costs, offer substandard services, or insist on compliance at any cost.

This is certainly the view of many academics. Rather than freeing them up to spend more time doing research and teaching, they now almost universally report spending a considerably higher proportion of their workweek doing administration than was the case two decades ago. They also note that while many administrative roles are less specialized than academic ones, and considerably less competitive, they often merit much higher salaries. In the UK, for example, four in ten academics in 2016 were reported to be contemplating quitting the jobs they consider to be vocational and that they had worked for years to secure.

Good Riddance Reviews

Methods for Finding Subtraction Targets

• Identify “stupid stuff.” Lisa Bodell, CEO of FutureThink, asks, “If you could kill all the rules that frustrate you or slow down your efficiency, what would they be?” A similar spirit propelled the Getting Rid of Stupid Stuff effort at Hawaii Pacific Health. Dr. Melinda Ashton asked healthcare workers to nominate anything in the electronic patient records system that “was poorly designed, unnecessary, or just plain stupid”—which generated 188 subtraction targets.

• Figure out the value and cost of your meetings. In their Meeting Reset, sixty Asana employees rated each of their standing meetings. They identified more than five hundred meetings that were of low value. And don’t forget the time that people spend getting ready for meetings. Bain, the management consulting firm, calculated that one company devoted three hundred thousand hours a year preparing for a weekly executive team meeting.

• Measure the burdens imposed by performance measurement. Are you spending so much time evaluating one another that you don’t have time to do your work? Deloitte’s leaders were appalled after they “tallied the number of hours the organization was spending on performance management— and found that completing the forms, holding the meetings, and creating the ratings consumed close to two million hours a year.”

• Catalog sources of email overload. The average employee spends 28 percent of their time dealing with emails. Is this true at your company (or is it worse)? Review the number, length, recipients, and timing of the emails that people send and receive. What can you subtract? Perhaps an email policy like that used at the consulting firm Vynamic will help. They call it zzzMail, as in catching some z’s: “team members are to refrain from sending emails to other team members between 10pm and 6am Monday through Friday, all day Saturday and Sunday, and all Vynamic holidays. In urgent matters, a call or text is preferred over email.”

• Observe and interview users. To identify unnecessary and confusing questions in a benefits form completed by more than two million Michigan residents each year, Civilla researchers conducted over 250 hours of interviews with residents and civil servants—and observed them as they filled out and explained the form. Civilla identified dozens of obstacles that jeopardized residents’ ability to get benefits.

• Build a journey map. Diagram the stages that customers or clients travel through as they try to get information, obtain services, or buy products from an organization—and how they, and employees, feel along the way. Our students Elizabeth Woodson and Saul Gurdus used interviews and observations to map the slow and bewildering process imposed on families of disabled children who sought services from the Golden Gate Regional Center, a social services agency in the San Francisco area. They identified numerous bottlenecks that marred clients’ journeys—especially botched handoffs between silos.

• Try a perfectionism audit. In The Systems Bible, John Gall proposed the Perfectionist’s Paradox: in complex systems, “striving for perfection is a serious imperfection.” Pressures for perfection cause needless effort and delay, interfere with learning from imperfect prototypes, and provoke despair. Many things that are worth doing—or are required by others—aren’t worth doing well. Or, as Gall preaches, ought to be done poorly. In that spirit, ask people to identify tasks where the standards are too narrow or too high, or that are enforced with too much zeal.

To help people apply this lesson, we’ve run the Subtraction Game with at least a hundred organizations, including: the top eight executives at Bloom Energy;100 credit union executives; 150 Netflix film postproduction employees; 300 partners in a big law firm; 400 Microsoft executives; and 60 Stanford staffers at a “Help Center” workshop. We ask people to start with solo brainstorming, to “think about how your organization operates. What adds needless frustration? What scatters your attention? What was once useful, but is now in the way?” For some organizations, we add, “Identify impediments that are within your sphere of influence and that are systemic at your company.” Next, people meet in small groups or online rooms for ten minutes or so, discuss the impediments each member generated, and brainstorm more potential subtraction targets. Then, to focus their attention, they select a couple of targets and outline rough implementation plans—who would lead the charge to eliminate these obstacles, whose support they would need along the way, and which people and teams might push back against the change.

Appendix

“We wrote a friction article for Gallup.com, “Too Many Teams, Too Many Bosses,” and for Times Higher Education, “Our To-Do Lists Can’t Grow Forever. It’s Time to Try Subtraction.