Cuidado com a eficiência

"Has the drive for efficiency through cost cutting gone too far?"

"“all else equal” rarely holds true in practice. Therefore, like all good things pushed too far, gains from incremental efficiency initiatives may not be worth the price paid to secure them.
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Efficiency initiatives usually pay attention only to readily measurable costs, ignoring unintended consequences and opportunity costs.
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Such is the thinking of modern corporate managers: They are brilliant at measuring costs and lousy at measuring professional productivity.
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Shortsighted trade-offs are magnified as companies globalize and outside business services proliferate. Managers must decide which activities (e.g., shipping) to outsource and, for those that remain (e.g., software testing), which to centralize or not.  And then there are the critical location decisions for the centralized and dispersed activities.
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Cost cutting also ignores external costs – what economists call externalities.
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Enlightened leaders are holistic thinkers. Rather than break their business into processes, they break their business into businesses and then give general managers authority to run them well."