> Business and management courses are not necessarily good.
I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.
I worked in a UK government office once where they had stopped giving teabags to staff as a cost-cutting measure. The project was £50 million over budget. That's a lot of teabags.
I interned at a large well-known tech company. When I started, in the break room, there was a Keurig machine and they would keep a large drawer stocked with plenty of k-cups.
Then one day, they stopped refilling it, saying they're cutting costs. I was like, really? Each employee, at most, is drinking $2 worth of k-cups/day. Meanwhile, you're paying them at LEAST $400/day.
The kicker is that the location had a cafeteria where they could get free coffee, but it was a much longer round trip to get there. It could easily be a 10+ minute ordeal. The productivity loss outdid any savings gains.
I suspect there was a big meeting with a bunch of managers about the need to make up a 7-figure budget deficit and 50 of the 60 minutes was spent bikeshedding about k-cups. :)
I suspect it's a sort of "penny wise and pound foolish" thing. You end up optimizing the small stuff (cost cutting, etc) and you lose the ability to drive big innovations.