When we carry out future -gazing or horizon scanning, we can often see likely large-scale changes ahead. For example, self-driving vehicles are coming. We are not sure when but they are coming. What does this mean for those who currently have driving jobs? Well, many of them will simply lose their jobs. However, take parcel

We should be able to assume that most business leaders are aiming to improve the productivity and performance of their organisation.  Yet, not many of them seem to be successful in doing this. This suggests these leaders are doing the wrong things or not doing the right things correctly. I think many of therm have

A lot of productivity writers and bloggers advocate a morning routine to set you up for the day. The problem with routines is that they tend to result in routine thinking. If you want fresh, innovative thinking you need to break out of the straight jacket of your established routines and establish some new routes

When improving performance, we often urge companies to take a longer term view. Forget short term gains and concentrate on the gains to be made year in, year out over many years, Yet, sometimes, companies should concentrate on the short term. If a company is in trouble, it might not be able to wait for

I was musing the other day about 'off the wall' inventions that might do good for the wrong reasons - or were designed to solve a problem that no-one knew existed. My starting point was some old news (2019) that a UK firm had designed a toilet that was specifically designed to be uncomfortable -

There has been much talk recently in the UK (before, during and even after, the election) about improving rail links to, and in, the north of England.  HS2 (the high speed link to London) might get all the publicity (and almost all of the money) but the government is also promising to invest in local rail

I saw recently that Mark Zuckerberg had had millions wiped off his ‘fortune’ by a small dip in Facebook’s stock value. Leaving aside the morality of the vast fortunes of these tech billionaires, I wonder whether  one can create a truly engaged workforce when the leader of the organisation ‘earns’ so much more than the

I was browsing the web recently when a headline “Offensive Productivity” caught my eye. It was an article relating to an American sports team and was bemoaning the performance of the attacking members if the team (the offence). Now, here in the UK, we don’t use productivity in relation to the performance of sports teams.

Politicians are binary creatures. They view important issuers as black and white,.  They are right and everyone else is wrong.  They rarely listen to conflicting views because they KNOW those holding contrary views cannot be right. Some business leaders act in a similar way.  They surround themselves with people of similar views or people who

Do we want to design processes that are ‘good’? Well, we first have to define ‘good’. I would suggest that ‘good’ processes are consistent processes. If a process is consistent, we can observe it, measure it and understand it. Then we can improve it, secure in the knowledge it will perform better - consistently. If