Work, Inefficiency and the Corporate Hydra That Grinds It To A Halt

In my decade-long career as a web designer, I’ve never been able to get used to the sheer lack of efficiency in the corporate process when building a project. From gathering assets, to upholding schedule milestones, to meeting deadlines, to making decisions, to arriving at consensus and to completing payment… it’s a process that gets irredeemably stuck in the rusty cogs of a bloated machine that has grown too fat to function with any reasonable efficiency.

As advertising legend George Lois wisely said: “Group thinking and decision-making results in group grope.” I’m a decisive one-man band who keeps it lean and works fast. “Design by committee” makes my head spin, leaving me amazed that anything actually gets done in the wake of so much wasted time and resources. I come from a show business background, where opening night is opening night, no matter how many more rehearsals you wish you had. For my own purposes, I work by a credo I heard from the TV sketch comedy deity Lorne Michaels, who said this about Saturday Night Live: “We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30.”