The interesting takeaway from this article for me was the notion of considering effectiveness rather than efficiency. That sounds good and feels right. And moreover, that's how nature works. (Bill McDonough, architect and author of Cradle to Cradle uses the example of a tree dropping hundreds of seeds in an effort to get one or two offspring — what he determines to be simultaneously both very inefficient and very effective.) The key for a business, though, is figuring out how you measure effectiveness or know if it manifests itself in your work/products/offerings. I don't know that this author offered any concrete ways of determining that.
But I do think it's an interesting concept to think about, and in fact it feels vital to long term success of any knowledge firm who has to compete with increasingly efficient machines/computers/software. Web developers used to highly valuable; now they are often commoditized with the ease of (and more to the point, cheapness of) Wordpress, Blogger, Drupal, etc. Videographers are in the same boat. A Flip cam or an iPhone and YouTube are cheap and easy (efficient) to use and often "good enough," especially to those tied to strict budgets. Thus the potential client list for traditional video production company shrinks dramatically if they try to compete on efficiency (cost and speed).
In our case, we strive to get compensated for our thinking and our ideas rather than our deliverables, which in the end often don't look that different our competitors -- even if the subtleties within them are of great value and importance. Service firms who never manage to help clients see the value in those subtleties end up competing on efficiency (how much can you build for how little cost?) rather effectiveness (do your ideas and end products work a lot better than your competitors?). Very few small firms can win that competition.
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