Organisational friction’, is a major deterrent for success and manifests itself through poor decision making, lack of agility, low levels of innovation and productivity. Successful companies need to move fast, when it needs to and in parallel, move slow at the right time.

The authors argue that great leaders running large corporations are ‘friction fixers’: they eliminate ‘bad’ friction and at the same time harness the much needed ‘good’ friction to build better organisations. As ‘friction fixers’, leaders master the art of understanding why and when a friction is destructive or useful, and make ‘right things easier to do’ and the ‘wrong things harder’.

‘Bad’ friction is highly underrated and least understood. This friction makes it harder, slower, or impossible to get things done. As we are familiar, many organisations are bogged down by robotic bureaucracy and computer generated administrative demands that cause ‘death by a thousand 10-minute tasks’.

Bombarding employees with long, dull and complicated e-mail, long and unproductive meetings, technology, apps and petty protocols that exhausts employees, numerous committees and oppressive rules are some of the ‘bad’ friction that needs to be managed and eliminated.

The authors quote research that shows committees become less efficient if the members exceed eight and become useless once they reach 20. It’s interesting to see that many leaders add more people to speed up projects that are running late, which ironically end up delaying projects even more!

There are also dangers from removing too much of friction from the ‘innovation’ process; creative thinking as an innovation process in many companies is horribly inefficient where too much time and money is wasted in developing new products. Yet many studies show, to do creative work right, teams need to slow down, struggle and develop a lot of bad ideas to find the rare good one!

Why good friction

Contrary to ‘bad friction’, ‘good’ friction is absolutely essential; where one has to make things harder or impossible to do. By design, there has to be ‘organisational speed bumps’ to prevent unfettered and overconfident leaders who squander organisational resources when they fall in love with flawed ideas and take half-baked creations to the market!

The authors site instances of leaders blaming and punishing employees who raise problems, point out colleagues’ mistakes and confess their own missteps, creating a culture of fear – places where people are pressured to sweep problems under the rug rather than resolve them. The authors quote the instance of how such a culture sunk Boeing through its 737 Max fiasco.

Friction fixers avert trouble before it happens; they don’t just repair or remove problems that flare up. The authors quote the famous saying of Archbishop Desmond Tutu; ‘there comes point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in’!

Anecdotes galore

The book provides a series of anecdotes on how great leaders manage ‘bad’ friction while deepening the ‘good friction’; perfectly balancing such activities and tread nicely on such a tight rope!

Great leaders believe that they serve as trustees of others’ time; thinking and acting as a trustee, guiding their colleagues on finding and repairing obstacles that squander other’s time and money. Serving as a trustee also means knowing how to get people to stop and think about what they are doing, and to inject friction when things ought to be hard or impossible!

Find the book here.

The reviewer is Distinguished Professor (Strategy & Accounting), Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai

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