The myth of the productive organization

What cost are you paying?

No business is perfectly productive and lost productivity results can be staggering. Studies in some organizations have shown that less than 20% of the organizations effort is spent enabling or creating customer value. The rest is spent on non-productive activity including unnecessary bureaucracy, rework, waste, and defensive behaviors. Another study found that average base costs of organizational processes were 30-50% higher than optimal. Other research shows that over 75% of strategic change initiatives fail to deliver the expected benefits. Most of these fail because of social causes such as failed commitments, lack of buy-in, and resistance to change.

Look at the costs in your organization over the last year. What percentages of those investments into people, process and strategic initiatives were productive? What added costs do you incur because of the resulting process breakdowns, failure to meet customer needs in a timely fashion, make market moves in a rapid fashion, or disruptive churn in your organization from frustration?

"After a series of fits and restarts on improving our performance we brought in Synaptus to sort out what had become a difficult situation. The comprehensive approach they brought to rapidly aligning the people and processes with our business goals was incredible. We initially achieved dramatic performance improvements. A year later we are independently moving forward with the roadmap we established and continue to grow as leaders and as an organization."

~ Mike Pascale, V.P. of Product Development, Atlanta, GA


There is room for improvement in every organization. If over half of your investments in people, process, and strategic projects in your organization are not producing profitable returns, then there is room for dramatic performance improvement. The path to this dramatic improvement calls for leadership and governance that aligns strategy, process, and people and overcomes the obstacles to sustainable change.

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