Efficiency

Efficiency Always Wins

Why true economic strength comes from lowering cost per unit. Ford, McDonald’s, and today’s AI efficiency race. Flow creates scale and resilience.

Bart van Maarseveen

25 Nov 2025 — 3 min read

Equinix, Amsterdam (NL). © Bart van Maarseveen, 2021

Why real economic strength comes from productivity, not prestige

Introduction

We’re easily impressed by superlatives: the biggest data center, the fastest model, the prettiest app.

But a sober look at history shows that the real winners were rarely the loudest builders, they were the ones who structurally lowered their cost per unit, creating freedom, scale, and resilience.

Efficiency isn’t a constraint. It’s the engine of durable growth.

The quiet law of growth

As markets become more complex, one economic law remains: whoever creates more value with less effort wins in the long run.

Efficiency isn’t austerity, it’s intelligence in action.

It brings order where there was busyness, calm where there was tension, and growth where waste disappears. The winner isn’t the biggest or the most beautiful organization, but the one that understands its processes.

Three lines that determine everything

Every organization constantly balances between three lines:

the perceived value the customer feels,
the price they pay,
and the cost per unit of result.

Once the bottom line drops, the others start moving with it. With every saving, more space appears—for margin, speed, and innovation.

Efficiency creates the breathing room in which strategic renewal can emerge.

Ford: from workload to rhythm

Henry Ford didn’t build a better car, he built a better process. By standardizing work, production time fell from 12½ hours to 90 minutes.
The price was cut in half, and scale doubled.

His factory became an orchestra of rhythm and simplicity. The innovation wasn’t in more features, but in the flow between them, where each movement reinforced the next instead of working against it.

McDonald’s: the kitchen as a factory

McDonald’s didn’t conquer the world with the tastiest hamburger, but with a kitchen that worked like a factory: short walking paths, repeatable steps, minimal variation.

Through simplicity came speed.
Through speed: scale.
And through scale: profit.

The secret? Fewer choices, more predictability, lower costs.
Lesson: standardization isn’t a limitation, it’s a condition for consistency.

The digital parallel

Today, the same pattern is repeating in the digital economy.

In the race for AI dominance, it’s no longer about who has the “biggest” model, but who builds the most efficient one.

Chinese players like DeepSeek and Alibaba show that progress doesn’t necessarily come from more compute, but from smarter architecture. Their models use up to 80% fewer GPUs, run faster, and cost a fraction of the American “feature-rich” variants.

Just like Ford once optimized the production line, they optimize the flow of computation—not by demanding more power, but by cutting waste.

Code becomes factory. Compute becomes rhythm.
The lesson is the same as a century ago: innovation through efficiency outperforms prestige through scale.

Big, beautiful, or good. But sustainable?

Prestige sells stories. Efficiency builds capability.

Those who chase prestige exhaust themselves. Those who follow efficiency let the market carry them.

Success isn’t determined by the allure of “biggest, prettiest, or best,” but by the calm with which processes can repeat themselves without energy loss.

Efficiency as strategy

Cut before you automate. Simplify first; digitize after.

Manage for flow.
Measure lead time, Work in Progress (WIP), and first-time-right.
Automate what pays.
Repeatable, predictable tasks deliver the highest ROI.
Optimize compute.
Smaller, smarter models (quantized, distilled) are the future.
Turn savings into advantage.
Use savings for shorter delivery times, sharper pricing, or more reliable service.

Once processes begin to organize themselves, the calm appears in which growth can accelerate.

Start tomorrow

Draw your value stream from lead to cash. Mark waiting time, duplicate work, and noise.

Pick one bottleneck and make it flow. Watch how the system starts breathing once waste disappears.

The biggest breakthrough is rarely in doing more, but in letting what already exists flow better.

Closing: efficiency is energy

Efficiency isn’t austerity, it’s a source of vitality. It brings rhythm, clarity, and confidence to the core of any system.

Just as Ford made the factory sing and McDonald’s made the kitchen dance, your digital operation can learn to move in flow.

That’s why CIOs and digital leaders increasingly choose smaller, more efficient models. Not because they’re less ambitious, but because they understand where the real economic leverage is.

Whoever treats efficiency as innovation creates growth that happens naturally—whether in steel, hamburgers, or algorithms.