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According to the laws of physics, the strength of forces such as electromagnetic radiation declines as the square of the distance from the source, since they have to cover the surface of a sphere whose radius is the distance from the source — an area, which is why the distance is squared. Since the universe might actually have more dimensions than the four accounted for in classical and relativistic physics, other forces, which interact in these dimensions as well, might decline even more rapidly.

But no physical force declines in influence with distance as rapidly as the remote offices of an average business. Sometimes, all it takes is an elevator ride to reduce influence to negligible levels.

Awhile back I wrote about the “proximity trap” — a pitfall in which those closest to you have the most influence on your decisions. Even with the best of intentions, the inconveniences resulting from physical and time-zone differences can circumvent effective communications, especially when compared to the ability of those close to you to buttonhole you in the hallway or sit down with you for lunch in the company cafeteria.

What I didn’t write about was what to do about it, as several correspondents pointed out. So here’s the first step in avoiding the proximity trap: Remain aware of the hazard.

This is more easily said than done. In any aspect of our lives, most of us, most of the time, unconsciously give the information we do receive more of our attention than the information we don’t receive. The legendary example of the pre-Iacocca Chrysler corporation is instructive: Faced with marketing surveys demonstrating the American public’s desire for small, fuel-efficient cars (okay, it’s a very old example!) the Chrysler executives asked friends at their country clubs whether any of them wanted to buy a small, fuel efficient car. None did, the executives rejected the survey findings, and Chrysler nearly went out of business altogether.

The Chrysler executives of this bygone era fell into the proximity trap — their golfing buddies had easier access than either the average car buyer or their marketing analysts. The result was basing a crucial business decision on information from a statistically biased source, which of course yielded biased results.

Often, your information will come from biased sources. You can’t help this, but you can mentally adjust for the bias.

Whenever you’re trying to make a good decision, pay attention to who you haven’t heard from on the subject. This is harder than it sounds. Imagine, for example, you’re wading through the pile of project proposals for the next fiscal year. Most corporate governance processes are designed to weigh the advantages of the various proposals received, to establish priority rankings for the enterprise. Relatively few look at the sources of the proposals to determine whether some constituencies are under-represented.

Look at yours. If you see a lot from headquarters but few from the field, or a lot from one or two field locations but few from any of the others, you know you have an issue. What to do about it? There’s no way of telling from your office. Leave your chair, leave headquarters, and find out.

Simple awareness can solve a bunch of proximity-trap issues. Take for example, an organization whose sales have collapsed. Faced with this problem, many business executives huddle at headquarters to brainstorm possible solutions. Let’s think hard: Shouldn’t they talk to their sales representatives? No, not their sales managers, their sales representatives. How many executives take this simple step? Not enough.

Here’s another example: How many times have you read in the newspaper that some elected official or other is going to eliminate waste in government? I’ve read it so many times I’ve lost count. Here’s what I haven’t read — that somebody is going to talk to a bunch of government employees, supervisors and middle managers to discover where money is actually being wasted. Instead, politicians argue about which programs to cut.

Sometimes, simple empathy is enough. If you find yourself in a discussion about some issue or other and what to do about it, look around the room and inventory the affected parties who aren’t present. When you have a chance, break into the discussion, list them on the whiteboard, and ask the assembled multitude what they think each of the missing might say if they were present. You’ll either get an answer or an awareness of the need to find out.

Even if there’s no time to ask the missing parties, second-guessing their ideas and attitudes is better than ignoring them altogether.

Not necessarily good, but better.

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To optimize the whole you usually have to sub-optimize the parts.

This is a fundamental reality of design. It isn’t, however, an original discovery. I personally first encountered the concept in Arno Penzias’ Ideas and Information (Simon and Schuster, 1989): “When each activity focuses on providing ‘quality service’ according to its own metrics, important efficiencies get overlooked.”

Are you going to argue with a Nobel Prize-winning physicist? Not me. But I wonder how many currently popular business trends are the result of ignoring this reality. Take the commonplace activity of benchmarking. Whenever you compare your organization’s performance to a best-practices benchmark, you’re making the unstated assumption that your company is trying to optimize the function in question.

No, it’s worse than that. A typical business function juggles six basic parameters: cycle time, throughput, overhead cost, unit cost, excellence (how Spartan or complete it is), and quality (adherence to specifications). It’s the traditional quicker/cheaper/better, but with the recognition that neither quicker, cheaper, nor better is as simple as it seems.

Here’s how this relates: When you make use of a benchmark you make two assumptions: That you’re trying to optimize the individual function in the first place; and that both you and the benchmark are trying to optimize the same parameters in the same priority ranking.

In any real business, neither assumption is likely to be true.

Let’s imagine you run the data center. One of the most basic measures of old-school data center management is cost per MIPS (millions of instructions per second). So you go out and buy some industry benchmarks. Low and behold, your cost per MIPS is 20% lower than the industry. It’s a mitzvah!

Well, no. Actually, it isn’t, and you’re a schlemiel, because you run the data center for a hospital, where five-nines reliability (99.999%) is the minimal level of acceptability. You’re only achieving nine fives. Sure, patients are dropping like pins on open lane night at the Alley Cat Bowl, but you’re beating the benchmark and that’s what matters — optimizing your area of responsibility.

Nobody would do that, of course. Certainly not you. First comes reliability (adherence to specification); cost comes next. So you get to five-nines, then check your cost per MIPS and find you’re 25% over the best practices benchmark. Schmuck.

That benchmark. Is it derived from businesses with similar goals and drivers? Probably not: The hospital you support has embarked on an ambitious program that implements electronic medical charts connected through wireless networks. It’s an industry-leading program that makes use of state-of-the-art technology, which is to say technology for which the bugs haven’t yet been worked out. Your ability to maintain reliability in the face of this program has had a significant impact on IT operating costs.

Which is to say, you don’t get to optimize your business function, nor does anyone else. Nor should they. It’s a fundamental problem with benchmarking that no amount of Yiddish can fix. Whether the subject is supply chain management, retail loss prevention or the IT help desk, benchmarks are useless, because they’re based on “best practices” designed to optimize the individual function. Well-run businesses, though, compromise every single business function to support the whole.

This isn’t just theory, either. I doubt there’s a reader of this column that hasn’t worked in a company in which executives and managers focus on taking care of their slice of the company, regardless of the consequences for the business as a whole. Chances are their bonuses depend on it. It’s organizational design predicated on the false premise that if you optimize the parts you optimize the whole. Whether you call it operating in silos, overemphasizing the organizational chart or a highly politicized organization, it derives from the same root cause: The self-defeating attempt to optimize the whole by optimizing the parts.

Are benchmarks completely useless? No. There are industries in which some functions are standardized, generally through external regulation. Aircraft maintenance would be an example. Under these circumstances, the regulator establishes all functional requirements, and a benchmark measuring the cost of operating that function does mean something.

But even here, it doesn’t mean much, because an airline with a brand new fleet of identical aircraft has different operating characteristics from an airline with a mixed fleet.

There’s a bare chance you might find a function in your IT organization for which some external benchmark, like cost per function point, might be meaningful. It isn’t impossible. After all, in an infinite universe, everything that’s allowed by the laws of physics must happen somewhere, sometime.

But in your IT department? I doubt it.

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