In today’s era of constant disruption, shifting markets, and unrelenting demand for innovation, one of the most powerful tools in a CEO’s arsenal is the ability to make the complex clear, the tangled streamlined, and the burdensome efficient.
As organizations scale, complexity is inevitable. New products, platforms, policies, metrics, and workflows are layered on, each intended to solve a problem or drive growth. But over time, these additions compound and can create organizational drag that stifles innovation, slows decision-making, and erodes financial performance and employee engagement. According to Bain & Company, excessive complexity—defined as an overabundance of layers, processes, titles, and approvals that dilute focus and distance leadership from the customer—costs large firms more than 15% of their annual profits. For Fortune 500 firms, that can translate into billions lost. It also fuels confusion on the front lines: In a 2023 McKinsey survey, 40% of respondents cited lack of clarity as the primary cause of inefficiency in their organizations.
Addressing this challenge requires more than trimming bureaucracy—it requires a systemic understanding of complexity across every level of the organization. “You cannot respond intelligently to complexity if you don’t understand what groups or what individual teams are doing,” says Christine Barton, head of BCG’s North America CEO Advisory. Both macro and micro insights are essential.
Recently, CEOs like JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Bayer’s Bill Anderson, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy have spoken about their efforts to eliminate bureaucracy, simplify operations, and build organizations rooted in clarity, speed, and discipline.
In Dimon’s most recent shareholder letter, he urged his senior team to rethink and streamline how they work. “Think about what you yourself can do to make things better. This is basic business: Can you do more with less? What are your units doing that can be streamlined? Or maybe you are doing things you don’t need to be doing at all,” he wrote. To reinforce that mindset, he introduced a 10% efficiency target across the organization.
“Things are faster and more complex now,” Dimon added. “That means we’ve got to move quicker, coordinate better, and do things at a faster speed.”
When Anderson assumed the CEO role at Bayer, he moved swiftly to dismantle the bureaucracy that had long slowed down the pharmaceutical giant and left employees, in his words, “burdened by the rules” and less customer-focused. He eliminated traditional decision-making hierarchies, annual planning cycles, and rigid org charts, replacing them with a flatter structure built around thousands of autonomous teams, each operating on 90-day goal cycles.
“The clock’s ticking every 90 days,” he told Fortune’s Leadership Next podcast in February. “There’s no safe place to hide behind a budget target. Do it, go fast, deliver better for customers, use the least resources. And we’ll talk about how you did four times a year.”
He added pointedly, “And, by the way, your peers are going to rate you.”
Meanwhile, Jassy’s simplification strategy at Amazon has centered on reducing the gap between leadership and execution. Last September, he announced a plan to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025——a move aimed at flattening the organization and accelerating decision-making. According to Barton, it’s a smart shift. By creating appropriate spans of control, she says leaders can empower integrators, reduce siloed behavior, and foster a culture of collaboration and shared accountability.
These leaders exemplify what Barton calls “continuous improvers”: executives who repeatedly examine their organizations through the lens of learning and performance, refusing to accept complexity as an inevitable byproduct of scale.
There is no silver bullet for organizational bloat. But in an increasingly volatile and fast-moving economy, simplification is a strategic imperative, allowing leaders to unlock agility, sharpen focus, and gain a lasting competitive edge.
