For more than 35 years, our founder, Jean-Pierre Dubé, an engineer, has worked on improving the overall performance of companies. Over the course of his career, he has supported more than 2,000 companies in about ten countries, yet one of the most important lessons of his career was passed on to him very early.
In the early 1990s, a Japanese sensei and former Toyota vice-president shared a deceptively simple equation with him: the sum of local optima never equals a global optimum. That idea remains at the core of how we work at Coboom today.
In many mid-sized and large companies, especially when economic conditions tighten, the reflex is to try to improve everything at once: functions, processes, indicators, roles, and technologies. Performance management systems often reinforce this logic by pushing each team to optimize its own area, which can improve local results without necessarily improving overall performance.
The reason is simple: a company is not a collection of independent parts, but a complex and interdependent system. A local improvement can shift a problem rather than solve it, speed up one activity while creating a bottleneck elsewhere, reduce costs in one function while increasing delays in another, or improve one metric at the expense of overall flow.
By trying to optimize everything, companies can end up weakening the system as a whole. In an environment of weak growth and limited room to manoeuvre, that illusion becomes particularly dangerous, because improvement remains essential, but improving everywhere without a system-wide view often means investing heavily while creating less value than expected.
For us, overall performance depends on deliberate strategic choices. That requires understanding how value actually flows through the company, from customer demand to the delivered product or service, because value does not follow functional silos, it follows flows.
Those flows, which differ by product or service family, need to be mapped and analyzed to identify the system’s true constraints, bottlenecks, critical activities, and the areas where improvement will have the greatest overall impact. The real strategic question then becomes much more demanding: what truly deserves to be optimized, and what should not be?
Making that choice requires managerial courage because it means accepting that not every function will perform at the same level or against the same criteria. That is neither failure nor incompetence, but the recognition that a high-performing system sometimes depends on deliberately accepted imbalances.
At Coboom, we therefore prefer to focus effort where it genuinely improves the system rather than trying to optimize everything at the same time.
