Category: 01. Overall

Technology is not enough for productivity that matters

Dani Rodrik, professor of international political economy at Harvard Kennedy School, is president of the International Economic Association and the author of ‘Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a Sane World Economy’ – extracts from his views follow: “Scientific and technological innovation might be necessary for the productivity growth that enriches societies, but it is …

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State of the Global Workplace: 2023 Gallup Report

A new report from Gallup offers more aggregated statistics that nobody can dispute – it merely adds to the dense information fog that leaders offer the productivity world – front-line managers should read on and be prompted to change, or not This annual report represents the collective voice of the global employee. In this year’s report, …

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£300 bn annual UK saving ignored!

In the UK alone, at least 80% of all organisations could improve their productivity by at least 20%, many by 50% or more A conservative 20% productivity improvement across all sectors would translate into an annual saving of at least £300 billion for the UK alone – realised by a combination of: Cutting waste, and/ …

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Billionaire investor warns inflation to curtail gains

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio sounded the alarm bell after inflation in the US surged to the highest level since 1990 and warned his social media followers that rising portfolio values do not necessarily signify increasing wealth. “Some people make the mistake of thinking that they are getting richer because they are seeing their assets go …

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The coming productivity boom

An article of optimism in the MIT Review by Erik Brynjolfsson and Georgios Petropoulos – AI and other digital technologies have been surprisingly slow to improve economic growth, but that could be about to change. Productivity growth, a key driver for higher living standards, averaged only 1.3% since 2006, less than half the rate of …

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Pandemic provides unexpected boost to UK’s productivity prospects

Valentina Romei offers the following in the Financial Times Technology and machinery investment is up 3.2% compared with pre-pandemic levels The shift to homeworking, online consumption and social distancing during the Covid-19 pandemic has driven increased investment in new technologies that could deliver an unexpected lift to the UK’s long-term productivity slump. Britain has been …

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How to solve the puzzle of missing productivity growth

A perceptive article published by the Brookings Institution and written by the well-known economist Erik Brynjolfsson and two colleagues, Seth G. Benzell and Daniel Rock Despite the economic damage wrought by the novel coronavirus over the past year, an analysis published by The Economist in December 2020 argues that the COVID-19 pandemic may have made a boom in productivity more …

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How We Work Has Changed Forever

Keir Weimer pens his thoughts in a Forbes magazine article – he adds that he is founder of Keir Weimer Multimedia, a real estate & lifestyle entrepreneur, No. 1 bestselling author, keynote speaker & high-performance coach.   The world has changed dramatically over the last 12 months, and so too has the way we work …

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The Silver Lining of 2020*

More reasons to be optimistic on this great day when the UK regulator passed the Oxford CV19 vaccine which could enable billions to look forward to a more normal, even better, life – this time from Tyler Cowen, economics professor at George Mason University, writing for Bloomberg.com – despite the pandemic, Tyler believes 2020 saw …

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Something more to look forward to in 2021

Ed Conway, economics editor of Sky News, recently wrote a positive article in The Times – in essence, his views were: For decades, developed world economies have lacked ‘oomph’ Productivity is the ‘silver bullet’ viz: The more we earn for each hour worked (an old school view) the more is spent on every other bit …

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Debt may be cheap, but the UK’s poor productivity will cost us dear

Phillip Inman, writing in the Guardian, says “Thinktanks urging cuts in business taxes to rekindle the entrepreneurialism of the Thatcher decade seem to forget that many industries which once powered growth are now dying” The strangely easy agreement between economists of right and left that the chancellor should set aside concerns about Britain’s rising debt levels still holds …

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Why Software Won’t Eat The World

An interesting article from Greg Satell offered by Medium.com which supports the argument that technology, artificial intelligence and computers in general are NOT poised to take over our lives and run the world In 2011, technology pioneer Marc Andreessen declared that software is eating the world. “With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market …

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CV-19 provides a giant leap for creative destruction

As the world focuses on ‘track and testing’ whilst medics internationally race to prove their CV-19 vaccine/ treatment stops people dying or suffering badly, there are many positives emerging from this damned pandemic – especially given it probably won’t be the last one, and some in the future may even be man-made Creative destruction of …

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Ridding ourselves of the productivity fetish will help us combat climate change

The following article by Simon Mair was published in  The Conversation  – despite some non-academic language, he highlights some of the productivity issues now afflicting more developed economies. Simon is an ecological economist, trying to understand the current economy in order to build a better one. He is also a co-investigator on the ESRC funded …

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Covid-19 kickstarts gigification of knowledge work

A long-needed article in the Harvard Business Review by Sameer Hasija, V ‘Paddy’ Padmanabhan and Prashant Rampai promotes an inevitable change in the way much ‘knowledge work’ will be conducted in future – back in the 80s, we ‘gigified’ much of our Productivity Services Division’s consultancy work, much to the disdain of many in the …

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Rebuilding the Economy Around Good Jobs

A prescient article in the Harvard Business Review by Professor Zeynep Ton In countries hit by the Covid-19 pandemic, customer-facing service businesses don’t just face a tough two to three months; they face a tough two to three years. Because people will still be nervous about catching the disease until a vaccine is widely available, …

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Piketty tackles inequality

Thomas Piketty, the French economist ‘rock star’, has just published a new tome – Capital and Ideology – a mere 1,100 pages of it David Smith reported in the Sunday Times that ‘it looks at inequality regimes over time’ Key points Piketty makes include: “Every human society must justify its inequalities” – but notes that the …

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Three Factors Of Successful Companies

Kweilin Ellingrud, a senior partner at McKinsey & Co, contributed the following interesting article to Forbes magazine   It’s been 12 years since the last recession, when the World Bank estimates that global GDP fell by 1.7%. But some companies were better prepared than others: their revenues didn’t fall as far and, as the recession …

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Mentalism overtaking Materialism

According to official statistics, the GDPs of all G7 developed nations have been trending flat, even downward, over the last decade and more The big question is whether, at the turn of the century, the G7 reached a watershed between their old 20th century materialist economies and the new 21st century mentalist economies – the …

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Economists’ information gap

Robert Samuelson, an economic journalist writing in the Washington Post, says: “Many economists often don’t know what’s going on” How refreshing to read this breeze of commonsense after being buffeted by gales of expert opinion and advice from the government and its agencies, economic think-tanks or the media The following is a precis of his …

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The evolution and future of productivity

The Universe is some 15 billion years old, apparently – ‘Big Bang’ followed, some 10 billion years later, spawning Planet Earth – then, over the last 4.5 billion years, life appeared on Earth and a wide variety of species, both flora and fauna, eventually emerged At first, resources needed for their survival – food or sunlight, say …

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Deaf ears encore une fois

Barnes Wallis, the English scientist of ‘bouncing bomb’ fame, once said: “There is a natural opposition among men to anything they have not thought of themselves” He might better have said ‘western men’ – ‘eastern men’ can be ‘all ears’ Once upon a time, just after WW2, three eminent American statisticians tried to convince US …

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The future is mental

Some say we won’t need to buy anything in future – we won’t own a thing Indeed, according to Trip Adler, founder of Scribd, a book and newspaper subscription service: “In future, you’ll just pay one thing and then have total freedom to consume what you want” Netflix for video, Amazon for shopping, Spotify for …

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Buffett bullish on the future

Warren Buffett, stock-picker extraordinaire and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, is one of the richest men in the world – his words are invariably ‘pearls of wisdom’ His optimism contrasts well with the pessimism of his fellow-countryman Professor Robert Gordon who claims progress, and so prosperity, has peaked A precis of a recent bullish article by …

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Future wealth will be different

There’s a world of difference between material and mental worlds The human race has reached a watershed, a tipping point, between the two where the mature benefits of the former seem to be peaking whilst the early benefits of the latter are rapidly taking hold So how do we differentiate between them? Material wealth = …

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Why chase productivity improvement?

1. Productivity improvement (PI) at national level has the following aims: To improve the standard of living (SoL) of all in the land, mostly by producing more and better material goods and services at more affordable prices whilst using fewer limited and so costly resources To increase the number, quality and rewards of jobs for …

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Productivity sure aint ‘dull’

The following is a letter sent to the Sunday Times on 17 July, 2017 following an article by Andrew Marr, the broadcaster and journalist, which concludes that ‘productivity is dull’ Productivity has transformed the lives of most people in the UK What were luxuries for a select few a mere 100 years ago, if they even …

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