Your work isn’t going to be perfect. There are too many constituencies and too many constraints. So what do you take as given and what do you think can be changed?
If you design consumer products, you will face many tradeoffs. People may like or need their products to be a certain shape or size. But manufacturing the product to those specifications sometimes costs more than you think you can afford. So which is the given and which is the variable? Do you assume that people’s wants and desires are unmovable or do you assume your manufacturing processes or margin requirements are unmovable.
If you’re in HR and you design policies and programs for thousands of employees you will also face many tradeoffs. You can shift work anywhere you want in the world to save money but it will make employees constantly fearful. You can create rules and procedures that help you better manage the business but it may annoy your workers or erode their sense of value.
I think that in business today, human nature is far too often treated as the variable and financial considerations are treated as the unmovable. I submit that this is bass-ackwards. You can suppress human nature for a time. But if you keep fighting human nature you will eventually lose.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Adam,
It’s not a question of ‘supressing’ the human nature. Sometimes you would ASSUME people will require something but you can find out that given a different thing, they are still happy. The phone sizes are a great example. Mobile phones were getting smaller and smaller by ‘customer demand’ however once the smartphones started to appear, it turned out that people are happy to have a bigger phone if they get some new features with it.
Gil: Excellent point! What I take away from this is that it is really important to truly understand the relevant needs – not just how they exist today but how they might exist in the context of some future world. Still, I do think that most managers truly believe (implicitly perhaps) that they can bend human nature to their will.