Your 52-Step Approval Process is a Flaming Dumpster Fire 🔥

Dean Palmiere | Eliminate Waste, carve out Efficiencies Everywhere

Ready to get pissed off? You should be.

Here’s the picture: an Olympic sprinter, laser-focused, ready to crush the competition. Except—WAIT—someone tied their legs together, slapped a 50-pound weight on their back, and stuck a panel of clipboard-carrying clowns at the starting line to decide if they’re “approved” to start running.

Sound ridiculous? Congratulations, you just described your company’s 52-step approval process.

💡 Innovation, My Ass

Here’s the dirty truth no one wants to say out loud: your approval process isn’t protecting quality; it’s fucking strangling it. You’re not “fine-tuning” anything—you’re burying it under mountains of red tape until it dies gasping for air.

Why? Because bureaucracy is a serial killer. It kills speed, creativity, morale—hell, it probably stole your lunch money too.

And let’s get real—those “approval” steps? Half of them are just glorified CYA moves. Risk-averse managers too scared to make a decision, so they create 17 layers of bullshit instead. Guess what? Your competition just launched the thing you’re still debating. Congrats. 🏆

🎯 How Bureaucracy Fucks Up Innovation

Let’s talk about the worst offenders:

1. The Endless Approval Chain: Everyone and their mother (and the CEO’s third cousin) needs to sign off. By the time they do, your idea is stale as hell.

2. Version Control Purgatory: Submitting the same doc 17 times because every manager wants their “input”? That’s not feedback—that’s death by paper cuts.

3. Committees About Committees: Imagine forming a committee to review another committee’s work. Yeah, it’s real. Yeah, it’s as dumb as it sounds.

4. Fear of Failure: Nobody wants to stick their neck out, so they create a process designed to prevent risk. Problem is, it also prevents results.

Dean Palmiere | Scrap the Bureaucracy

💣 Blow It the Hell Up

Here’s the deal: simplicity wins. You want speed? Creativity? Results? Burn your approval process to the ground and rebuild it from the ashes.

🛠 Practical Moves to Unfuck Your System:

1. Cut the Crap: If it doesn’t add value, kill it. If it’s redundant, kill it. If you can’t explain why it exists in 10 seconds or less? KILL. IT.

2. Empower Your People: If you can’t trust your team to make decisions, why the fuck are they on your payroll?

3. Set Deadlines: Decisions that drag are decisions that die. Clock’s ticking—move your ass.

4. Stop Being Scared: Innovation is messy. Take risks, screw up, learn, and do better next time.

🚀 The Real Leaders Are Already Doing It

The best companies? They’re not buried under red tape. Think SpaceX, Tesla. You think Elon Musk needs a three-week approval process to pick a font? No. He’s too busy telling his team to move faster and break shit.

And no, you don’t have to launch rockets. But you do need to ditch your bloated processes. Complexity isn’t competence—it’s cowardice.

🔥 Call It Out

What’s the dumbest, most soul-sucking process at your company? Drop it in the comments. 20 emails for a meeting? Six sign-offs to order Post-its? Let’s hear it.

And hey, share this with your boss. Maybe they’ll realize running a business isn’t the same as running a kindergarten.

Stay tuned for more hard truths, because next, we’re ripping apart the leadership bullshit that’s holding your company back. Spoiler: it’s not about “vision boards.” Buckle the fuck up.