Big, Slow, and Dying

Why Large Companies Strangle Themselves?

Cutting costs or firing people doesn’t make an organization healthier. Let’s get that out of the way. It’s a desperate short-term fix designed to make executives look competent while avoiding the real work of fixing what’s broken. So what actually makes a company healthy? Simple: it must produce value efficiently. And if your company is bloated, slow, and buried in bureaucracy, you’re failing at that.

The Slow Death of Big Companies

Most large, traditional businesses are caught in a cycle of self-inflicted decay. They’ve been around for decades, lost any competitive edge they once had, and no longer sell a killer product that commands a premium price. Instead of adapting, they rely on financial trickery—legal, but misleading—to hide the reality: their cost of delivering a product or service is bloated or out of sync with the market, leaving them at a disadvantage against leaner, more adaptive competitors.

This is the equivalent of an out-of-shape person who, after a brutal health check-up, turns to crash diets and medication instead of fixing their lifestyle. These companies limp along, pretending things are fine, until—suddenly—it’s too late. And then everyone acts surprised when they collapse.

The Efficiency Lie That’s Killing You

Here’s the biggest mistake big organizations make: they worship efficiency. Sounds crazy, right? But hear me out. The “efficiency” most large companies chase is an illusion.

They build organizational structures designed for maximum utilization of people’s time—specialized teams, rigid departments, layers upon layers of process. The idea? Ensure every employee is busy, minimize idle time, and become a well-oiled machine.

The result? The work itself suffers.

Work gets bogged down in endless hand-offs, waiting in queues as it moves from one overstuffed backlog to another. The more steps, the longer it takes to get anything done. But hey, at least everyone looks busy, right? That’s what matters in these companies: not outcomes, not impact—just the illusion of productivity.

The Culture of Busyness

In organizations obsessed with perceived efficiency, busyness becomes the ultimate virtue. Having downtime is seen as laziness or being non-productive, and weak leaders fuel the problem. Instead of defining clear priorities, making tough decisions, and focusing on outcomes, they take the easy escape: they give their teams “autonomy” to pick work that feels valuable and may not actually matter. The result?

• The tail wags the dog—teams set their own priorities while real business goals get lost.
• Leaders avoid hard decisions and instead bounce from meeting to meeting, micromanaging things that don’t move the needle.
• Employees create work to look busy, filling the company with meaningless tasks and bureaucratic nonsense.

So, what happens when real, valuable work needs to get done? Nobody is available. And instead of cutting the dead weight, companies hire more people, ultimately adding to the inefficiency once their initial value is exhausted. The cycle continues, while leadership deludes itself into thinking they’re running an efficient operation.

The Only Metric That Matters: Cycle Time

If you want to know whether your company is actually healthy, stop measuring busyness and start measuring cycle time—the time it takes for a piece of work to go from start to finish. A long cycle time with significant wait times means your organization is a sluggish mess. A short cycle time means you’re moving fast and outpacing the competition.

Think about it:

• If your company takes forever to get things done, you’ve got too many hand-offs and an obsession with efficiency that’s actually killing you.
• If getting anything approved feels like passing a law through Congress, you’re drowning in bureaucracy.

Fix those problems, and everything else follows: faster decisions, better products and services, higher profits.

The Painful but Necessary Fix

So how do you turn this ship around? Here’s the uncomfortable truth: you have to do the opposite of what you’ve been doing.

1. Stop tracking who’s busy. Nobody cares. Start tracking whether work is flowing.
2. Fix work bottlenecks instead of keeping people occupied. When work is stuck, solve the problem instead of asking, “What else can people work on?”
3. Kill the illusion of efficiency. Accept that some people might not be at full utilization. That’s fine. If work flows smoothly, the business wins.
4. Make real leadership decisions. Prioritize ruthlessly. Cut useless work. Remove roadblocks instead of hiding behind process and meetings.

This shift will feel unnatural, especially for leaders who’ve spent their careers in the old system. It will feel inefficient. It will feel wrong. That’s how you’ll know you’re on the right track.

But if you don’t make the change, don’t act surprised when you end up like the 52% of Fortune 500 companies from the year 2000 that no longer exist. Your company isn’t too big to fail. It’s just big, slow, and dying. Unless you wake up and do something about it.