You ever notice that often the more (money, time, people) you throw at a problem the more that the problem will demand of you. Much the way that no one every makes enough money because as soon as you are earning what you consider an ideal amount of money that is suddenly not be enough any longer.

This idea would resonate nicely with Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group UK, who gave his second TED talk recently titled, "Sweat the small stuff" in which he outlines what he describes as a strange disproportionality at work. On the one hand this is the tendency of an organization or institution to deploy as much force as possible -- as much compulsion as possible, whereas actually, the tendency is for a person to be almost influenced in absolute reverse proportion to the amount of force being applied.

One of my favorite stories of this kind is the one in which a man approaches a tooth paste manufacturer and offers for a very large sum of money a guaranteed way to greatly increase their sale for very little money and effort. As legend would have it, after some negotiation they reached a deal and called all of their experts to a meeting to hear this idea. In a room filled with executives, scientist, marketing people, manufacturing experts and sale people everyone waited ready to absorb whatever might be relevant to their division to make this sudden and low cost increase in sale happen. At the appointed time the man walked in the room and walked to the chalk board and drew a large circle on the board. He then turned to everyone and said, "Make the hole bigger" and left the room.

Now this may be fiction and it may be truth, but if you are old enough you will clearly remember the hole getting bigger and in fact many companies employ this simple tactic all the time.

There is also the story of the cosmetic company that after having issue with soap boxes reaching market with out product in them invested considerable sums to solve their process failure as opposed to the smaller company which simply used a large commercial fan in the final stage of the assembly line to blow any empty boxes from the belt.

Mr Sutherland asserts that the problem is that the persons who have the power to do anything about an issue also have very very large budgets and rather what we need is a class of people with immense power, but control over only small amounts of money.”

Gwen Darling has often blogged about the fantastic healthcare system in her home town of Fayetteville, Arkansas where it seems that one can book an appointment to see a doctor, send in all the forms online and show up for an appointment with a doctor who will actually not make you wait to be seen. However it would seem if you need a followup appointment and there are no openings for several weeks and hence you wish to called if there are any cancellations the office staff resorts to the post-it on the side of the computer monitor system since their expensive and complicated computer system has no way of tracking a cancellation wait list (no wonder the Doctors run on time).

Sutherland shared the following chart in which he defined four conditions based on the amount of effect vs the amount of money required for a solution with four outcomes:

Trivial, Little effect and little cost

Consultancy, Little effect and lots of cost

Strategy, Lots of effect and lots of cost

and

{insert your title here}, Lots of effect and little cost.

Sutherland asserts we need a name for this fourth scenario and that companies should have a C-level officer who has great powers but little or no functional budget who would see that ideas like these happen.

For my part, I would suggest the fourth box should be titled finesse although others online have suggested elegance, tactical, innovative, effective and many more. Maybe "the right solution" says it best.

What is it about us which makes us miss the simple, straight forward solution in favor of the complex and costly? Why do we agonize, strategize and contrive to achieve the simple things like getting a meeting with someone when perhaps we might just call the person and ask for the meeting?

Not that I am not deeply impressed by our loyal (if not absent by necessity) ExecTec member David Locke's recent post on "Building a Dog. Oh, Make that a Cat", however should not a simple no we need to stick with building a dog have been sufficient. Do we really need David's in depth study and explanation of why the strategy of cats and dogs is bad?

Join us as we explore how to not overlook the simple solutions in favor of that which is complicated and costly.

As always, there is no better way to meet and connect with other executives then over dinner and conversation. $21 in advance via PayPal or $25 at the event gets you a full dinner, drink and the best networking around.