Rob Arnold

The Doorman Fallacy 'You have a five-star hotel and it has a doorman, welcoming incoming guests. McKinsey or Accenture will come in and say, “Your doorman currently costs you X thousand dollars a year. We have defined his or her function as opening the door. We’ll replace said doorman with an automatic door-opening mechanism and an infrared human detector and we’ll save you $30–$40,000 a year.” They walk away, and they take the credit for the cost savings. Two years later, the hotel’s a catastrophe ... because the doorman was doing multiple things, many of which were human and kind of tacit. Security would be one; there are no vagrants asleep in the doorway. Hailing taxis, dealing with luggage, recognizing regular guests, providing status to the hotel—there are loads and loads of value creation components to that doorman which aren’t captured in the open-the-door definition." It's easy to see the visible things, but the invisible things make the difference.