Via Scoop.it – Leading Lightly – Managing Mindfully

Michael Schrage writes in HBR about getting boring things done in organizations. Most enterprisess have boring tasks that somehow never really get done right – fixing manual processes and bottlenecks, getting those last 10% of an application performing just right, etc. These are tedious tasks that often take lots of effort and have no immediate visibility in the value chain for the customer. So, often these mundane tasks are given to average employees.  But Schrage writes about a discussion with successful entrepreneurs who advocate the opposite, to use top talent to ‘fix’ these problems. According to the saying: if you want something done, give it to a busy person, the rationale is that ‘talent’ will see and use the opportunity to fix it faster.  I would add that this type of assignement would have other, indirect benefits: having the ‘talent’ work along the ‘drones’ will hopefully give each a bit of appreciation for the other. The talent will see some of the problems the drones have to deal with and get to (hopefully help them) and the drones get to see the talent get its hands dirty with boring work, as well as having a chance to talk at eye-level. A very pragmatic way of mixing the 2 groups and hopefully leading to greater understanding and appreciation.   What do you think?
Via blogs.hbr.org