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

Sometimes, very small parts of a process can have a massive impact on overall performance. Take Formula 1 racing. Quite often, the winner is determined by when tyre changes are carried out .., or the speed at which they are carried out. Yet tyre changes probably account for less than 1% of elapsed time. So,

Many of us are about to celebrate the start of a new year. It is traditional to make resolutions or promises to oneself that should make us a better person in some way. Those of us who are committed to productivity or performance improvement should make a similar professional promise. For example if you travel

Six Sigma is based on consistency - on reducing variation so that processes run smoothly and consistently, to their specification. Most processes have some variation - due to inconsistency of raw materials, variations in machine or equipment performance, human inconsistency and error, variations in the environment and so on. We either have to stop such

What will a group of productivity experts do for you if you want to improve productivity. Well, the best you can expect is to gain wisdom about best current practice.  That’s the job of an expert - to disseminate the best of current knowledge. What the experts won ’t necessarily give you is innovation, new thinking

Why do people keep pretending that useful things have not been invented For example, I keep seeing waiting staff in restaurants struggling to carry more than a couple of plates and IK want to shout 'There is such a thing as a tray" but some unwritten convention decrees the tray to an 'object non grata'. 

When we are young and inexperienced, we tend to think that if we work harder we will be more productive. As we gain experience (and age), we start to realise that this is not true.  Too much of our effort is unproductive.  We slowly learn to work smarter, to prioritise, to  eliminate waste, to think our way to

I was back in China last week. The economic miracle of China is well know but many people still think it was, and is, built on cheap labour and ‘copycat’ products. These people have never been too a modern Chinese gigafactory - lots of automation, just in time manufacturing, good use of AI - all