Have you ever thought that having plenty of resources at our disposal can actually be harmful?
Let me narrate a story
When I started my professional journey with Tata Motors (it was Telco then), I got an opportunity to spend a few months at the Jamshedpur plant as a part of my induction and training. Near the plant entrance, a display board was installed that would report the number of vehicles produced on the previous day, during each shift.
One day, we observed that the production for the night shift was displayed as ‘zero’ while the other 2 shifts were still running at full capacity. Later, we came to know that the Night Shift had been suspended due to reduced production requirements.
This intrigued me. I wondered why we would not divide the production numbers proportionately and continue running all three shifts. My mentor then explained that running shifts on partial capacity would adversely impact the overall efficiency and incur additional overheads like electricity, compressed air, etc. These can be avoided by temporarily shutting down the night shifts. The night shift will be restarted once the requirement exceeds a set threshold.
Shutting certain shifts or closing the entire plant for a few days is a common practice across industries where the demand is seasonal, and the cost of stocking the finished product is very high. Partial closure ensures that the remaining shifts or production days function at optimum levels.
“Our biggest cost is not power, or servers, or people. It’s lack of utilisation. It dominates all other costs.“
Jeff Bezos
Why Having Plenty of Resources Is Not Good?
We had discussed a similar concept in one of my previous blogs, Mastering Time Management in Remote Work Environments, where we talked about how extra available time often adversely impacts our efficiency.
In any business or operation, if plenty of (in other words, more than optimum) resources are available, it is quite difficult to ensure their optimum utilisation, and it often leads to increased consumption or waste, loss of efficiency, productivity and cost-effectiveness. Simply put, the ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ applies.
Talking about resources, we are mainly focusing on three types of resources. Human Resources, Financial Resources and Infrastructure & Technical Resources (Tools, Equipment, IT Resources, etc.).
How Plenty Impacts Various Types of Resources
Let us see how the abundance of each of these resources impacts the overall business operations.
Human resources
It does not require much thought to fathom how having too many people around and a limited number of tasks to do would be disruptive.
Even if, for a moment, we ignore the extra wages bill that we might be footing, there would be other implications.
For example, not having enough work creates a sense of insecurity among the hardworking employees. If this state of plenty continues for long, they might start looking out. It also ensures that all our performance measurement systems go for a toss.
Idle or partly loaded people might indulge in ‘extracurricular activities’, thus disrupting their own and others’ concentration. This would result in a poor quality of work, overall lack of focus and indiscipline in the work area.
Once people get used to working in a casual environment, it would be difficult to get the work discipline back once the workload increases.
It is therefore important for us leaders to ensure that optimum manpower is made available for deployment. In case we have plenty of people, we must take a call to quickly reassign them to different projects, engage them with refresher training, skill development program, etc.
One good idea could be to deploy them on a few special projects aimed at improving the quality of output, process re-engineering, exploring opportunities for economies of scope, etc.
financial resources
A few days ago, I took an online course by Prof John Mullins on the topic ‘How to Finance and Grow Your Start-up – Without VC’. In one of the lectures, he revealed an interesting fact that if a Start-up is able to raise plenty of capital during the initial rounds of funding, the chances of its failure go up tremendously.
While access to money or a healthy credit line is necessary to run the day-to-day operations and realise long-term growth plans, eventually, it is a double-edged sword.
According to the experts in this area, having plenty of money at our disposal makes us complacent. Since the adverse economic effects of a possible failure are mitigated by the availability of an unlimited supply of money, the hunger to succeed goes down significantly.
It completely blocks the possibilities of ‘Frugal Innovation’ and also promotes unnecessary expenses. For example, hiring avoidable or high-cost Human Resources, Investing in very costly technology or equipment, etc.
Leaders must, therefore, keep a tab on the amount of money that is being spent and the value it is creating for the customers and the stakeholders in return.
Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.
Ayn Rand
Based on their assessment, they should ensure the availability of funds in a manner that the end-users realise that the funds are not available in plenty and have to be spent optimally. It is not easy money at their disposal for them to burn.
infrastructure $ technical resources
In September 2014, ISRO successfully put our Mangalyaan into the Mars orbit in record time and at a fraction of the cost compared to the other similar successful missions conducted by the likes of NASA.
While a lot has been written on the cost-effectiveness of this mission, in my opinion, one very important factor for success was ISRO having a tight budget and limited access to know-how, tools and equipment required for these kinds of missions.
This challenged our scientists and forced them to develop most of the stuff from scratch and reuse the available waste or discarded stuff from other projects, eventually resulting in a cost-effective and successful mission.
It is also worth noting that during the development process, a lot of experiments and projects must have failed, thus giving our scientists valuable lessons on what would work and what would not work. This would have created a huge repository of knowledge, which would be an asset for future projects and missions.
Now imagine if it had been possible, had ISRO had access to plenty of monetary and technological resources. Or if ISRO had simply collaborated with an agency like NASA and carried out a joint mission instead.
Conclusion: Plenty of Anything Must Be Avoided
The point I am trying to drive is that not having plenty of resources impacts our work significantly and thus motivates us to exert our efforts towards looking for alternative solutions and methods to perform a particular task.
It also forces us to think out of the box, improvise and use the existing know-how to achieve desired results instead of blindly investing in an uneconomical technology.
In the end, I would like to quote from our ancient scriptures;
अति सर्वत्र वर्जयेत् (Ati sarvatra varjayet)
This means that in nature, everything has to be in balance. Plenty of anything is detrimental to the cause, hence it must be avoided.
I am positive that you found this article informative and useful!
Please subscribe to my blog by filling in your details below:
My blog has countless such articles and stories to guide you and quench your thirst for knowledge.
You can also follow me on X and Facebook to read more such stories and posts.
Leave a Reply