Musical Chairs
The company had a sprawling campus with many partially-populated buildings. During an economic downturn, senior management wanted to save on real estate taxes by consolidating the people into fewer buildings, allowing for demolishing of remaining empty buildings. Directives came from the senior executives to each functional director, “move your teams into smaller spaces”. Unfortunately, this message failed to fully articulate the end goal, and there was no overarching champion in charge of coordinating these relocations to deliver the required vacant buildings by a specified deadline.
Predictably, as one team would shrink their footprint, another team would identify the newly emptied space as nicer than their own and move in. This game of "musical chairs” continued as dozens of teams were moved all over the site. Over a year later, not a single building had been vacated. Many teams were disrupted, significant moving costs were incurred, but buildings were all still partially filled, none could be demolished, and not a single penny of real estate taxes was saved.
I took two lessons forward in my career: People will do what they’re being measured on (“reduce my team’s footprint”) without regard for the big picture (“empty these 3 buildings by end of Q3”). And, to avoid non-productive “local optimizations”, it is essential to have a designated champion with the authority to hold people accountable to the overarching goal.
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