Those of you who read last week's post will know I was in the USA on vacation.  I am now back in the UK and can reflect on the political differences. The USA was preparing for the mid-term elections and there was continual political advertising on the TV - most of which was completely negative,

I’m currently touring parts of the USA with my son, on vacation. We both like a mix of natural beauty, tradition and live music. Tradition anchors a country in its core vales, though the U.S  is having great difficulty at present at remembering and applying its own core values as carved on the Statue of

When I was growing up, there was a great controversy about whether fluoride should be added to drinking water to combat tooth decay in children.  In the end, science ’won’ and children’s teeth have been much healthier since. Now we have a need to combat another problem. Politicians have become very adept at ignoring science

If at the end of a typical working day (of, say, 8 hours) you had to go and start another job elsewhere, I would expect your performance on Job 2 to be limited and poor. Yet, in many organisations, we see people working well into the evening or taking work home with them - in

Parkinson’s Law famously stated that work expands to fill the time available. That is why we say “If you want something doing, give it to a busy person.” Non-busy people make themselves look busy by expanding the work to fill their available time. Busy people fit the work into their available resources, condensing the time

I was musing about robots recently - as one does ... and started thinking about the sociology of such devices. Humans in a work situation can be excellent performers as individuals but the real performance gains come when humans are organised into cooperative and collaborative teams. Will the same be true for robots? The answer

I read a piece the other day on the use of productivity measures for academic staff. The measures were all about output quantity (presumably with the proviso that papers wouldn’t be published if they didn’t meet quality criteria). However what matters is not quantity of output or quality of output but the impact of that

Artificial Intelligence is said to be set to revolutionise many sectors. Is this a force for productivity gains or just a threat to jobs? Well, as the Australian Productivity Commission said recently, technology has over time created many more jobs than it has replaced.  But like Moore’s law, most technology trends eventually come to a

Modern workplaces seem antagonistic to efficient working and productivity.  They are noisy, stressful, full of constant chatter. constant interruptions from telephones, streams of emails and so on. Perhaps its time to turn the clock back.  Get rid of some of the technology. Start to think about the workers, not the kit. We know that productivity

Most of us try to organise our working day to maximise performance and efficiency. Yet for many of us that day can be ruined before it really starts. If we rise and start worrying about what we should wear (which tie?) and then have a stressful commute, we have drained some of our precious potential