Many people (even quite a lot of managers and directors) think that productivity improvement involves cutting costs. It can - and certainly cutting costs should improve productivity. However this should not form the basis of a productivity improvement strategy. Concentrating on cutting costs tends to lead to, at best, sub-optimal changes in the organisation and, at worst,
I read a lot of papers and articles about productivity - or more usually, about the lack of productivity. Most Western nations have had little productivity growth over the last few years. Many of these articles will make some kind of diagnosis - what has gone wrong or what needs putting right. Occasionally I
There has been much debate over the relative productivity effects of working from home (WFH) versus office-based versus hybrid working. Companies who sought to reduce property expenses by switching to WFH have generally been disappointed by the resulting productivity delivered and quite a few have tried to encourage or even insist upon return to office-based working (RTO). Employees,
A recent article on the Gartner website suggested that with other approaches not producing effective results, what the business world needs is better human resource management to improve labour productivity. I couldn't agree less. I've said before that whoever coined the phrase 'human resource management' should have been shot - at least twice. Referring to employees
We know that innovation often arises from an odd or unexpected coming together of people with disparate skills, different attitudes, different knowledge sets and perhaps different attitudes. There are even innovation approaches and techniques that aim to simulate (or stimulate) these 'comings together' amongst individuals. Yet over the last few years we have allowed workers to
I was reading some research recently which suggested that managers and employees have quite different assessments of how much time might be saved by the introduction of AI to an organisation, with managers expecting significantly larger productivity gains. This may not be surprising but it is important. It means that employees are more wary about AI
Do you spend a lot of trime reading- and writing - emails? Are you an avid user of Slack or What's App? Many people do / are. Well, perhaps you need to rethink your approach to communications. Why not talk to people. Generally, face-to-face, or at least synchronous, communication is better for complex and important matters. It
Now is the time to reflect on the last year. What went well? What went badly? What have you learned? What should you have learned? What new skills have you developed? If you are not happy with your answers, you need to try harder in 2026. You have to do better. You can't expect others to
It is often said- probably because it is true - that small businesses are the bedrock of a healthy economy. Business leaders know this; even leaders of large businesses, for their businesses were small once. One assumes that political leaders also know this - for they are reminded of it regularly when discussing growth strategies. Yet politicians
I've been using AI systems for a while now. I mainly use Chat GPT but I have tried a few others to see how they compare. My executive summary is that particular systems may be better at specific tasks but ChatGPT is the best all-rounder. However, these systems are not perfect. I have had problems with ChatGPT failing