Author: Sofija Mijalkovic

Efficiency is doing a task with the least possible time, money, or energy.
Effectiveness is doing the right task in the first place.

Why Effectiveness Comes First

You can be extremely efficient and still fail if you’re working on the wrong things.

When someone optimizes the wrong task, the resources they “save” don’t matter. They’re still being spent on something that doesn’t move the goal forward. This is why effectiveness precedes efficiency.
Once you know you’re doing the right work, efficiency becomes meaningful.
And when you combine both, clear priorities and smart execution, you get real performance.

Common Failures When Efficiency Comes First

1. Teams that automate the wrong process

Many teams rush to automate tasks to “save time”, but if the task itself shouldn’t exist, the automation only locks them deeper into an unnecessary workflow. They become efficient at producing something the organization doesn’t need.

2. Managers who measure activity instead of progress

Some managers push for more reports, more meetings, and more visible “busyness.” They create teams that look efficient because they move fast and deliver many outputs, but outputs are not outcomes. A team that delivers irrelevant work on time is still failing.

3. Companies that cut costs instead of solving problems

Cost-cutting feels efficient, but it often ignores the real issue.
Companies freeze hiring, reduce training, or shrink support teams, thinking they are optimizing, when in reality, they weaken their ability to execute the work that actually matters.

4. Students who optimize study techniques without choosing the right goals

Many students focus on studying “faster”, watching summaries, or optimizing note-taking systems, but once again, if they’re learning the wrong material or avoiding the core concepts, it doesn’t matter how efficient their method is.

The Relationship Between the Two

It doesn’t matter if you’re extremely efficient, fast, don’t spend a lot of resources, it you’re doing the wrong thing. And if you’re doing the wrong thing, then you’re not really efficient in the big picture. By definition, efficiency requires minimizing the resources spent to achieve a valuable objective. If you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re wasting resources. In that way efficiency follows effectiveness and vice versa.

Still effectiveness must come first, first you need to do the right thing, and then improve the way you do it.

Effectiveness guides direction, efficiency improves the journey.

I attended the World Open Innovation Conference 2025. It was my first time attending any academic-business conference, let alone one centered around open innovation, a field I’m still very new to.

What surprised me most wasn’t the presentations or the structure of the conference (although those were impressive on their own). It was the people. I met researchers, managers, innovators, professors, entrepreneurs, people with decades of experience and still, everyone talked to me. Everyone made space for me. It’s rare to be in a room filled with experts and not feel small.

The highlight of this was meeting Henry Chesbrough, the father of open innovation and the central figure of the entire conference. You’d expect someone in his position to be distant or rushed, but he was the exact opposite. He asked me what I thought, how I felt, whether I understood everything, and if I was enjoying it. He treated my perspective as something that mattered, which, when you’re new, means everything.

I absolutely loved was seeing open innovation in action across such an absurdly wide range of topics. South Korea using open innovation as a tool of diplomacy. Companies using it to reshape their digital strategies. Even researchers applying it to Dungeons & Dragons. It made me realize how flexible and powerful the concept really is, how it’s more than a management idea and closer to a mindset, a way of seeing collaboration everywhere.

Overall, WOIC 2025 was an incredibly positive experience for me. It made the future feel a bit bigger, a bit more open, and a lot more exciting. And if this is what the world of innovation looks like, curious, collaborative, generous, I’m glad I stepped into it.

Change is normal. Change is needed. If you want to be someone, you need to change into that someone.

But you can’t grow into a new version of your life while remaining the old version of yourself. If you want different results, you have to become someone capable of creating them.

Change isn’t just for individuals. Everything needs to evolve: universities, companies, teams, systems. Inertia is comfortable, but it’s also deadly. Organizations collapse not because they’re attacked, but because they protect inefficient processes with the classic excuse:  “That’s how we’ve always done it.” Entire institutions defend outdated models long after they’ve stopped working, hoping tradition will compensate for stagnation.

Change is scary. It’s a fear of stepping into a future you can’t fully predict. But the alternative is worse: staying in one place while the world moves on without you. Growth requires discomfort. Innovation requires risk. Progress requires letting go of the familiar.

You need to constantly examine who you are, how you think, and how you work. Because the only thing more frightening than change is waking up one day and realizing that nothing around you changed, because you never did.

Management schools love theory more than reality. We’re told to memorize definitions, frameworks, and lists we’ll forget by next week, as if that builds real managers. Exams reward memory, not understanding. We can recite the five functions of management, but we’re never taught how to actually manage people, make decisions, or fix problems.

And it’s not just management. Most subjects follow the same pattern of empty learning. Even languages are taught like math: rules, tenses, and definitions instead of real conversation. You can’t learn to speak by reading grammar tables, just like you can’t learn leadership by repeating textbook phrases. The entire education system is obsessed with measurable outcomes, not meaningful learning.

Real knowledge comes from doing, from trying, failing, and improving, yet universities fear that chaos. It’s easier to test definitions than to test understanding. So we graduate with perfect notes and no idea how to apply them. The system doesn’t teach us to think; it teaches us to repeat.

Modern management has made a religion out of safety. Every process, decision, and idea now passes through a filter of caution. The goal is not to build something new, it’s to make sure nothing goes wrong. But without risk, there is no innovation. Playing it safe may keep companies alive, but it also keeps them irrelevant.

Innovation is born from uncertainty, from trying things that might fail. Yet managers today are trained to fear failure more than stagnation. Every idea must be justified, tested, approved, measured, until it’s no longer an idea, just paperwork.

The irony is that the greatest companies in history were built by people who ignored the rules. Now, those same companies hire managers to make sure no one else does the same.

The safest path is now the most dangerous one, it leads straight to irrelevance. A culture that kills risk kills its own future. No risk, no innovation, no improvement, irrelevance, failure. It’s that simple.

Meetings are the most accepted form of collective procrastination in modern management. Everyone knows they waste time, yet no one dares to cancel them. They exist not to solve problems but to create the illusion of control. Managers call them to feel relevant, and employees attend them to look engaged. Real work pauses so that fake work can be performed in PowerPoint.

Decisions that could take five minutes by email turn into hour-long performances of agreement. Each participant speaks just enough to sound important, while saying absolutely nothing. That’s why meetings are loved: they’re the safest place to hide from responsibility.

The modern manager’s calendar isn’t a schedule; it’s a defense mechanism. The fuller it is, the more it proves they’re “needed.” A packed schedule has become a status symbol, even if every meeting is pointless. Efficiency is preached, yet the most inefficient ritual remains sacred.

The worst part is that meetings reward performance over progress. You don’t need to do good work, you just need to look like you’re doing it.

A good meeting today isn’t one that achieves something, it’s one that ends early. And yet they keep multiplying, like an infection nobody wants to treat. Maybe the real question isn’t why meetings still exist, but what management would look like if they didn’t.

Peter Drucker’s The Effective Executive is one of those books everyone in management worships, but few actually question.

It teaches how to be efficient, focused, and decisive, but never asks why or for whom. Drucker assumes that organizations are inherently good, that being “effective” automatically means doing the right thing. But what if you’re effective at something destructive? What if the system itself is broken? His world was built on clear hierarchies and rational decisions, not the chaotic, politicized, short-term world of management today.

Drucker believes you can learn effectiveness through discipline and self-control, but that logic collapses when executives don’t even control their own purpose, shareholders and politics do. Modern managers aren’t executives; they’re bureaucrats, trapped in frameworks Drucker could never have imagined. Efficiency has replaced ethics, and productivity has replaced meaning. Drucker didn’t write a bad book, he wrote a timeless one that no longer fits its time.

I see no hope for this country anymore.

A few months ago, I believed that maybe the students would win, that the protests could finally remove this leech of an incompetent, corrupt president and bring at least a shred of order to Serbia. But nothing changed. The protests may not be officially over, but they feel dead, and the same man still sits in power, more erratic and disconnected by the day.

Serbia is officially branded as a “flawed democracy” that is undergoing democratic backsliding, according to analyses from organizations like Freedom House, but even that sounds too generous. What we truly have is a dictatorship disguised as choice: one man surrounded by loyal, unqualified lackeys who hold positions they don’t understand, while real experts are pushed aside or leave the country entirely. The result is everywhere, collapsing buildings, broken roads, failed institutions, all built by people who were never meant to build anything.

Crime goes unpunished because the guilty all “know someone,” and that someone always leads back to the same circle of power. The media are captured, the old are brainwashed, and the young are leaving. The few who stay and try to create something, small startups, independent thinkers, are crushed before they can even start. Corruption keeps its monopoly, and in doing so, ensures that innovation, like hope, cannot survive here.

By not having innovation, you are damning your country to failure. The only current sources of income for Serbia are exploiting its natural resources and selling real estate, something that should be a basic human right, not an industry. There is nothing being created here. No new products, no unique services, nothing that carries the mark of Serbian ingenuity or progress.

Unlike developed economies such as the US, the UK, or France, which thrive on innovation, technology, and global exports, Serbia feels hollow, like an imitation of an economy rather than a real one. We survive by draining what we already have instead of building something new. Our resources will run out, and our real estate bubble keeps inflating, pricing ordinary people out of their own cities. Without innovation, creation, or ownership of ideas, a country isn’t growing, it’s just waiting to collapse.

For a Faculty of Organizational Sciences, FON seems to have forgotten the meaning of the word.

What follows isn’t just student frustration, it’s a reflection of how a university that teaches management consistently fails to manage itself.

The academic year after the students’ protests has been absurdly managed, eight months without classes, followed by six back-to-back exam periods and no real breaks. The dean publicly “supported” the protests, but his actions said otherwise, online lectures resumed despite widespread opposition, and students were treated like obstacles, not participants in the system. Some professors even blamed the students for the disruption, as if demanding a better future for our country was a mistake.

Instead of standing with their students, they used fear, claiming FON would lose funding or programs if we continued to protest, without any proof. The real issue isn’t the protest; it’s the refusal to take responsibility and organize effectively.

Even FON’s website, with its confusing navigation and fragmented systems for exam registration, mirrors the disorder within.

Beyond logistics, FON feels like it’s training us not to be leaders or entrepreneurs, but obedient middle managers in someone else’s system, to give up before we even start. Our classes, books, and case studies rarely ask us to imagine building our own Serbian company, only how to “help a German company make more money.” Because how could a company exist and survive in Serbia when corruption is all it currently knows.

We’re taught management theory every day, yet surrounded by an institution that can’t manage itself.