Business is Slowing Down

[xoxoxoBruce]

The business sector of the economy is doing pretty well according to most pundits, unless they're touting a book they wrote that says it isn't. But Fortune Magazine says business is slowing down in another way.

Across my travels, I get to talk to hundreds of top managers at the world’s largest companies, and they share a common complaint: “It’s just so hard to get stuff done.” Such bureaucratic frustrations probably date back to the Medicis. But at CEB we’ve collected a wealth of data that indicates a clear and troubling reality: Most business activity is slowing down, not accelerating. In benchmarking the speed of key processes across the corporate sector, we find again and again that decision-making at even the most basic level has slowed materially over the past five to 10 years. A few examples from our research illustrate this trend.

I'm wondering if this is what my buddy working for Bell Labs in Texas bitched about. Everything was fine, they were making tons of money, then the bloat of the middle managers came like the creeping crud, sucking them dry.

Hiring a new employee, for instance, now takes 63 days, up from 42 in 2010, according to a 2015 study we did with 400 corporate recruiters. Meanwhile the average time to deliver an office IT project increased by more than a month from 2010 to 2015, and now stands at over 10 months from start to delivery—this particular nugget coming from a study we conducted with 2,000 project managers at more than 60 global organizations.

And when companies need to mesh processes, things get even slower. Multiple surveys we did with several thousand stakeholders in the realm of business-to-business sales revealed some striking evidence of institutional delay. The time required for one company to sell something to another, for example, has risen 22% in the past five years, as gaining consensus from one or two buyers has turned into five or more.

There's a lot more.