Behind the Firewall: Notes of a Punk CIO

The setup

Every exec deck demands it. Every transformation promises it. We trim, optimize, automate, consolidate … but what exactly are we sacrificing at the altar of efficiency?

Efficiency sounds noble, it feels responsible, but when we chase it at all costs — across teams, meetings, decisions, and budgets — I think something fundamental erodes on the way there.

The myth of total efficiency

Business culture has become obsessed with doing more with less, we aim for “efficient everything”:

• efficient meetings
• efficient teams
• efficient feedback
• efficient onboarding
• efficient collaboration

but here’s my opinion: not everything valuable is efficient and now that I’m thinking about it, not everything efficient is valuable (BTW true story, someone rolled out a tool to auto-ping “great job!” messages based on ticket completions. Guess what happened after the third robotic kudos?). So

What we lose in the pursuit

The list may not be complete, some may overlap and the order of their importance is subject for debates, but

🧠 Thinking time
Deep thought doesn’t happen in 30-minute back-to-back slots. When calendars are maxed and decisions are rushed, reflection becomes a luxury we can’t afford — and long term usually suffers.

🧪 Experimentation
Innovation is inherently wasteful. Tests fail, ideas get scrapped. Real creativity thrives in mess, redundancy, and iteration. But there’s also something else: where there are many brains, there are more ideas, ideas that bounce off each other, that collide, combine, spiral upward. It’s not a pipeline — it’s a storm; and storms are never efficient. Kill inefficiency, kill invention.

🤝 Human connection
Efficient meetings are short, sharp, and sterile; no small talk, no detours. But real trust — the kind that builds resilient teams — lives in the unscripted moments. In our obsession with speed, we often silence the voices that need the most space: how many times have the lowest-paid-contributors in a meeting prepared passionately for a rare audience with leadership, only to be cut short in the name of time management? That moment doesn’t just kill their idea — it kills motivation, courage, and the belief that initiative matters.

🌱 Mentorship and learning
Teaching someone takes time. It slows things down, but skip it, and you create dependency, turnover, and stagnation. Even when time is carved out, mentorship can’t thrive without trust — and trust is rarely built inside scripts. Trust grows in spontaneous moments, in vulnerability, in off-topic chats – in a nutshell in the things efficiency tries to eliminate.

🎯 Purpose and meaning
When everything is measured by output per hour or tickets closed, people forget why they’re doing the work. Meaning dissolves into metrics.

🎷 Culture
Culture doesn’t fit into a sprint. it thrives in rituals, jokes, coffee chats, late-night problem-solving. It’s slow, t’s human and – my opinion only – it’s essential.

My final take

I myself lead programs where efficiency is the main KPI: headcount down, cycle times cut, teams merged, systems merged, you name it and sure, the slides always look good. But what I think is missing from the dashboards:

• how many future ideas were never spoken?
• how many talented people checked out mentally (or even physically)?
• how much trust was eroded in the name of speed?

Efficiency is a powerful force; when applied with intention, it enables focus, reduces friction, and protects people from chaos. It’s how we scale what works, cut what slows us down unnecessarily and this is how we create operational clarity. No modern organization can succeed without it. But efficiency is not a purpose. When you elevate it to your North Star, you begin to sacrifice most of the qualities that make organizations resilient, inventive and above everything else, human.

So i’m not here to burn down efficiency, I’m here to reclaim the space it’s stolen ❤ ❤ ❤

(Update1: of course inefficiency can be abused too. We’ve all seen the type — meetings that spiral into philosophical meandering, people who love the sound of their own thinking, initiatives that start with big talk and never land)