How come every Zoom call lasts precisely 1 hour, no matter how mundane the call is? And why did all the toilet breaks disappear as Zoom became everyday work life in our bedrooms?
Why has a simple action like buying office equipment turned into a 6-people-committee decision followed by a 5-level approval process?
When a 264-page PPT deck starts with “Welcome to the Christmas Party Planning Meeting”,… it’s time to call the Ministry of Common Sense – to end it once and for all! It’s time to eliminate the wasted time in red tape, remove the silly rules and recover common sense to serve our customers better.
The endless PowerPoint that no one will ever read, the 200 emails you are copied on for no reason, meetings that beget more, and so on… Bureaucracy, lengthy processes, lack of feedback and clear objectives are at the root of a colossal waste of productivity and motivation in companies.
But this is not a fatality, and solutions are within our reach! With his keen eye and experience, Martin Lindstrom, an expert in business transformation, delivers an action manual in which employees and managers become “agents of good sense” in 90 days. Your mission? Redeploy collective intelligence, improve communication between management and teams, eliminate dysfunctions and useless processes, and free the company from its internal problems to finally find the true meaning of work. In his latest book, The Ministry of Common Sense: How to Eliminate Bureaucratic Red Tape, Bad Excuses, and Corporate BS, Lindstrom shares dozens of these examples and a methodology to overpower this corporate nonsense. The idea? To point out everything absurd and frustrating in our daily work lives and to make changes.
Anyone working in a large company will recognise themselves in Martin Lindstrom’s book. From technological tools that complicate life more than they simplify it; to useless meetings to the need to have five people validate a process with no stake in it. The author humorously identifies the inconsistencies in companies and gives concrete tools to end the nonsense.
The most evident audience for this book is the C-level executive in a large global company, and small business owners would also benefit from reading this book. It is a cautioning account for those who are scaling their business. Indeed, you’ll find a virtual playbook for what NOT to do. Rather, than stories and “case studies” are many experiences from his life as a trusted advisor over the years.
If the critical question is “What happened to common sense?” Then the answer is, “Putting rules, technology and legal compliance before empathy ultimately gets in the way of common sense.”
Turmoils tend to lay naked inconsistencies, cracks and all the additional ways we make life unnecessarily difficult for customers and stakeholders. Unless the weeds of rules and processes are periodically cleared, the efficiency of organisations plunges.
This book is a crucial enabler for leaders to construct teams and organisations where common sense is a practice rather than a peculiarity. The book allows us to have self-compassion with ourselves as we look to bring more common sense and empathy into our organisations.
Learn more at MartinLindstrom.com On Instagram: #LindstromCompany or on Twitter: #MartinLindstrom