Successful Departments. Failing Company.
Local optimization improves a component. Enterprise optimization improves the system.
Executive Idea
Functional leaders are supposed to optimize legitimate objectives: growth, cost, service, reliability, quality, risk, or talent. Trouble begins when those objectives are optimized independently and the enterprise absorbs the tradeoff elsewhere.
Executive Question
Where could a decision we consider successful be transferring cost, delay, workload, risk, or customer effort somewhere else?
Try this in your next leadership conversation
Pick one recent functional improvement. Trace its consequences across at least two other functions and one customer or workforce outcome. Ask whether the net enterprise result improved.
Go deeper
This lesson is an interpretive public learning experience. Use the canonical DOS™ reference or the full Executive Perspective for the governed source and deeper context.