Dave Teleki wrote in to say, “Something’s been nagging me about your phrase ’emaciated and unpleasant’, your replacement for ‘lean and mean’, and I have now figured out what it is.

“‘Emaciated’ is just a bit too Latinate and abstract. And ‘unpleasant’ is this year’s contender for understatement of the decade.”

Mr. Teleki doesn’t claim to have the ideal alternative, although one of his suggestions, “starved and rabid,” does have some promising characteristics.

So we’re gonna have us a contest. Send your synonyms for “lean and mean” to [email protected]. The deadline is July 26, 2004. We’ll feature the winner as the ManagementSpeak for a future column, and the winner will receive a free copy of Leading IT: The Toughest Job in the World as a prize.

The opinion of the judge … that would be me … is final. There’s no appeal, and I don’t enjoy duck hunting.

And no, the first runner up will not receive two copies.

Speaking of lean and mean, I’m getting bored writing about how to do more with less. That’s been the subject of the last six columns, and there are at least another fifty to go. Let me know if you’d like more; that will influence how often I add to the collection.

But before we leave the subject, the whole topic of organizational efficiency is worth a bit of inspection, because it’s something lots of executives — business as well as CIOs — get wrong. Here’s the problem:

Every business has a strategic theme — an underlying focus. Some strategic themes are overt, stated, and actually guide action. Others are window-dressing — covers for the unstated strategy that really guides action.

There are sixteen strategic themes to choose from: Product, customer, market, utilization, technology, sales/marketing method, distribution, natural resources, size and growth, return and profitability, shareholder value, the deal, amoeba, Charybdis, wait-’em-out, and find a buyer. (My list began with the ten themes provided by Michel Robert in his excellent Strategy Pure and Simple, (McGraw-Hill, 1993) to which I added six very common unstated strategies not covered by Mr. Robert). Of them, maybe six require efficiency as a core focus.

This isn’t to say efficiency is unimportant in companies pursuing other strategies. Of course it is. But when goals conflict, a utilization-driven company will choose efficiency at the expense of product excellence where a product-driven company will make the opposite decision.

Some business executives understand this point and use it to create competitive differentiation and advantage. Others fail to do so. They’re the ones who, when asked which of the three most common themes is their company’s driving force (product innovation, customer intimacy, or operational efficiency) respond, “All three.” It’s a paradox: Claiming they want a disciplined organization, they themselves are too undisciplined to make an essential choice.

And it is an essential choice. Certainly, a company driven by product innovation can’t afford to get sloppy or it will lose money on every one of its innovative products. But a company that must choose between spending more to improve a product and spending less to price more competitively needs to know which of the two is the right decision. The too-frequent answer is to decide on a case-by-case basis, which is always true and is also always ducking the issue, because every employee in the company needs to know whether the company competes on features or price.

Which brings us to IT. Even some business executives who have otherwise mastered the art of choosing and focusing on a single strategic theme then turn to IT and forget all about it. The company might be driven by an emphasis on customer relationships, but IT needs to be leaner and meaner.

Well, okay, that makes sense, so long as the management of customer relationships doesn’t depend on the use of information technology. Otherwise it’s as if a marathon runner was to say, “I run on my feet. Why should I care about my knees?”

The answer, in both cases, comes from a very old song: “The ankle bone’s connected to the shin bone. The shin bone’s connected to the knee bone.”

Since IT is connected to every bone, aimlessly cutting the IT budget isn’t just bad business.

It’s bad physiology.