Lately there have been many announcements about efficiency that I thought it would be a good idea to tackle this topic. Many people confuse efficiency with effectiveness. Let’s compare the two to see what our corporate VP’s are really saying.

Effectiveness according to Stephen R. Covey is all about being proactive, planning for the most important things, the “big rocks,” and yet not so urgent items. It’s all about being in control of your own destiny. It requires a higher level of communication, a win-win attitude. Being effective is recognizing that there are different levels beginning with us as individuals, as teams, and lastly as an organization. Being effective is where we want to be.

Now moving to the other word, efficiency, according to American economist, Peter F. Drucker, he states that “efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” In other words, to be efficient means to improve on the present situation and get more from what we have gotten before. Here is a little riddle that I have used before and really gets the point across:

          If you always do what you always did…

…You will always get what you always got!

Now moving to a more formal definition, according to The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, efficiency is the ratio of the effective or useful output to the total input in any system. Again we see our other familiar term effective but this time described as useful output. When I saw this, things started to make a little more sense. Let me illustrate by using this example,

If we were given a budget of 1000 hours to perform a task, but in reality we used up 1300 hours, this would mean that we were inefficient (or wasteful) as we spent 300 hours more than allowed.

So you can begin to understand a little better when BK talks about efficiency across ATM. Here is a direct example of what this means taken from his latest GM corner, “On the Structure and Efficiency Team (SET) front we announced the last of our factory merges with the Pudong Chipset and CPU factories. This should be the last of our factory mergers.” Once again what is the goal? The goal is to produce more with less by becoming more efficient.

Let’s bring this closer to us in A7T7, how are we becoming more efficient then? Take a look around you. You may not be able to directly control what the organization is doing or even what some our departments are involved with. But then according to our old friend Covey we can indeed control what we as individuals can do.

Every day we make choices that unless we pay close attention may impact our efficiency or inefficiency. The time it takes to get ready for our next meeting, preparing in advanced for that important presentation, being early or late for our training, how long of a break we decide to have, etc. are just simple examples where we have direct control over what we produce. A good way to improve on something is to actually measure what we do right?

At Intel we have indicators and metrics for everything. So why not then we start measuring our efficiency too? Here is a way that you can do this. Write down how long it takes you to perform all the tasks within a day for a week. Do it to the minute. At the end of the week you can assess where you spent your time and then begin to take measures to improve on them. You will be surprised as to how much time we really waste or are inefficient. It’s easy and you can even try this for your personal time. Let me know how you do as I am always interested in how well our site is improving all around.