My staff, when they think I’m not within earshot, likes to joke about “you know how Don is about paperclips.” The topic is almost always about spending money, and the paperclip is somewhat symbolic.

Long ago there was a request to purchase a significant amount of paperclips. Normally an order like this would just be blindly placed, and routinely paid for. This time I said no. I asked, “why do we need so many new paperclips? What happened to the old ones? They don’t wear out, where do they go?” I further challenged the staff to figure this out. I told them my theory: most of the time, a paperclip goes from department to department, as paperwork gets passed around. Chances are, we have some departments that send a lot of paperclips (and therefore run out of them), and others that receive a lot of paperclips (and therefore collect them). So I asked people to consider where they send most of their paperclips, and to find out the supply on hand in that department.

Lo and behold, they found that a lot of paperwork (bound by paperclips) is sent to our lab. And….you guessed it….our lab had piles of paperclips filling up a drawer. In fact, during this simple process, when the lab staff was approached about having the paperclips retrieved, the response was, “oh good, we were about to start throwing those away, we get so many and they take up a whole drawer.”

Yet, before this discovery, we kept ordering paperclips month after month.

A minor expense, to be sure, but it is all about the thought process. How many supplies and instruments are ordered as a matter of routine just because someone, or some department, is low on inventory? If we allow (or teach) our staff that when you run out of something –just re-order it, we may be wasting money (and drawer space). And if you can get your staff to think about small things like paperclips, you can easily get them to stop and think about any re-order (we found a similar result with internal envelopes-some people send ‘em, some people receive ‘em). And pretty soon people start re-considering bigger ticket items. Do we really need to replace that broken copier? Does everyone in this department really need a larger computer monitor? Do we really need all those different colors of copy paper?

Now, we spend less on paperclips than we used to. I’m assuming we spend less on other things as well. So I don’t get offended when I hear the jokes; it means someone is giving a second thought before placing an order.