In Time, Talent, Energy, Michael Mankins and Eric Garton assert organizational drag is a crippling illness. “The company suffering from it wastes time, performs unnecessary tasks, and operates inefficiently. Curing the organization of this illness requires the kind of careful, sustained time management and complexity-reduction measures that we have described here and in the previous chapter.”

They recommend three ways to simplify almost any organization’s operating model:

1. Count up the nodes. Executives often find themselves surprised by the number of nodes, or intersections, in their organization. That’s why big decisions take so much time; each one has to wend its way through many nodes.

2. Hold your operating model up to the light. Look at structure, accountabilities, governance, and ways of working. Nearly every company can simplify its operating model in each of these dimensions.

3. Think about spans and layers in this context. Conventional spans-and-layers analyses don’t accomplish much because spans and layers are really an output of your operating model.

Mankins and Garton explain HOW to do all this in Chapter 3.

Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag & Unleash Your Team’s Productive Power, will be published by Harvard Business Review Press (March 2017).