Tag Archives: Cost management

Are you spending 50 quid to save a fiver?

Any good Finance Director or CFO will have a keen eye on the running costs of the business. The last thing they’ll want to do is make it harder than it needs to be to create the profit the business depends on to survive and thrive.

But sometimes the need to control what people are doing to make sure costs are properly managed can be carried too far.

More often than you might think, the costs of control far outweigh any potential savings the control might bring you.

Why thorough processes delivered to a high standard might account for all the problems in your business

The world is becoming more process-orientated. There are positive aspects to that – if you’re the pilot of a 747, the Operations Director of a nuclear power plant or a surgeon carrying out microsurgery on a vital organ, I’d feel a lot more comfortable knowing that what you did, and the order you do them in, had been arrived at in a reliable, dependable way.

But for most other activities, we’ve been led down a path of greater use of processes to govern every aspect of our lives. I’m not sure that’s a good thing