Every Corporation Needs a Marie Kondo
The antidote for bureaucratic creep? An annual spring cleaning to prune long-winded reports, time-sucking meetings, and, yes, value-destroying managers.
Let’s take a look at that org chart and meeting calendar.
Photographer: Variety/Penske Media via Getty Images
Spring is the season for thorough cleaning. Throw away the year’s accumulated junk. Eliminate the mess. Tidy the cupboards. The house will not only look better for it; the inhabitants will get a new bounce in their step.
The ritual has different rhythms in different parts of the world — in Japan, for example, “big cleaning” is done in late December. Consultants have also added a new rigor to the process. The Japanese cleaning guru Marie Kondo has created a multinational company selling “the life changing magic that comes from tidying up.” The Swedish cleaning guru Margareta Magnusson extols the virtues of a “death cleaning” that leaves your children with less to go through when you die. But the principle is the same everywhere. Junk accumulates. We need to make regular efforts to keep it under control.