Over complicating things is a bad idea
August 6, 2008
My Irregular chum Jason Busch talks about the misery of over complicating life by injecting too much by way of rules into ‘getting things done.’
In the buy-side contracting world, I’ve seen strict “rules” around indemnification, for example, get in the way of agreements, not to mention cost savings. Perhaps we should take a more optimization-driven approach to many rules, letting suppliers tell us what certain rules are worth. Then decide whether or not we can Rule without them.
It’s an interesting topic and the original post by Tim Cummins raises useful points, especially when dealing with US organizations. It plays directly ot the debate around the adoption in the US of judgment based accounting ‘rules’ as compared with the existing strictly rules driven regime.
It’s a topic of increasing frequency. On the one hand, some people think that rules are really the only way to go because they set easily definable and visible boundaries. The problem is it hasn’t worked. The continuing issue of accounts restatement isn’t going away and the number of fraud cases is a contant source of entertainment. The really big issue is cultural. When you’ve been used to frameworks that allegedly provide clarity, it’s a devil’s own job to give that up. Especially when that means the locus of power in the audit relationship switches TO the auditor.
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