Edition 59 | 03 November 2026

Welcome to The Perspective, a weekly note on work, leadership, and clarity. The aim isn’t to add another voice to the noise. It’s to slow down for a moment, look at something carefully, and see what’s actually underneath. Some editions land practical, some more reflective. All chosen to help you see the pattern behind the noise.

A note this week on the small rules that cost organisations more than they save, and why the saving is almost always easier to see than the cost.

Save the Cents, Lose the Rands

At a mid-priced restaurant recently, I asked the waiter for a serviette and he brought me one. I had a runny nose, so I walked to the counter and asked for more. He gave me a stack. The manager came over and asked whether I had spilled something. A spill gets a cloth, he explained. Serviettes are one per customer, to keep costs down.

A table at that restaurant spends several hundred rand. A serviette costs the restaurant a few cents.

The rule saved a few cents. It cost a second trip to the counter, a conversation with the manager, and a customer who now remembers the rule better than the meal.

I have been thinking about why rules like that exist, because they are not restaurant rules. They appear everywhere.

An expense policy that requires three signatures for a R200 claim, because somebody once submitted a fraudulent one. An HR process that routes every leave request through two layers, because somebody once took leave they were not entitled to. A procurement rule that caps individual purchases at R5,000, forcing people to split invoices to buy a laptop. None of these were designed to annoy anyone. All of them were written in response to a specific incident, usually by somebody trying to prevent the specific incident from happening again.

The problem is that the rule survives longer than the incident, and it applies to the many to defend against the few.

The arithmetic is almost always the same. The rule saves a measurable number, the few cents on serviettes, the R200 on fraudulent claims, the R5,000 on unauthorised purchases. The cost is a less measurable number: the second trip, the extra sign-off, the frustrated employee, the customer who tells six people what happened. The organisation can see the saving in its accounts. It cannot see the cost anywhere, because it never shows up as a line item.

This is not an argument against rules. Organisations need them. The argument is about proportion. A rule designed to prevent a small loss should not routinely impose a larger one. A rule that protects against the 1% abuser should not alienate the 99% who were never going to do that thing. When the rule costs more than the abuse it prevents, the rule is not working. It is simply visible, which is a different thing.

The restaurant manager was polite. He was following the rule. He was almost certainly measured on his cost base. Nothing about his behaviour was unreasonable within the system that produced it.

I like the restaurant. I will go back. It is a good spot for a meeting and nobody is going to lose a customer over a conversation about serviettes.

I will not tell them about the rule either, because it is not my job to fix it. And this is quietly the point. Most customers who notice a small rule like that will absorb the frustration, carry on with the meal, and never say a word. The restaurant will never know the moment happened. It will carry on with the rule, because nothing in its daily operation signals that the rule needs changing.

The accounting will still look good. The P&L will still celebrate the saved cents. The rands lost will keep arriving as a quiet underperformance that nobody connects back to the rule.

Save the cents. Lose the rands.

Most of the costliest decisions in business are the ones that look like savings on paper.

👉 I shared the shorter version of this on LinkedIn last week:

View the full post and comments on LinkedIn

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The Longer Read

The Quiet Side of Travel: a year on

A year ago this week I published a short piece on the quieter texture of work travel. Not the airport lounges and conference-stage photos most people picture, but the loneliness between time zones, the small rituals that make the road survivable, and the specific stillness that only exists at thirty-five thousand feet.

I have been thinking about it again this week because the observation has sharpened rather than aged. The best thinking I do still happens in that suspended quiet above the clouds, where no phone works and no meeting lands. The idea for The Bottom Line began on one of those flights. The decision to start posting on LinkedIn every day began on another. Neither would have survived a normal Tuesday at a desk.

Not every edition needs to be about this week’s news.

Read the piece

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On My Desk

I have not read a book in a while. The habit slipped at some point this year, and I noticed only once a month or two had passed without finishing anything. This past weekend, I started again.

The book is Setting the Table by Danny Meyer, the hospitality operator who built Union Square Cafe and Shake Shack. A friend recommended it. I had been meaning to open it for a while, and this weekend it finally came off the pile and onto the desk.

Which is a coincidence I only noticed afterwards, because the feature above is about a restaurant too. Not the Danny Meyer kind, though. Setting the Table is about the opposite instinct, how you build a place that is remembered for the care rather than for the rule.

I will say more about the book when I have finished it. For now, it is just satisfying to be reading again.

Closing Perspective The rules that look most sensible on a spreadsheet are often the ones that quietly cost the most. Not because the rules themselves are wrong. Because the saving is measurable and the cost is not. Which is worth noticing, because the hardest thing in any business is to see what is leaving the room when nobody is counting it. Keep thinking. Move forward. — Yusuf Visit my website

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