Ben Gallagher, co-founder of B+A, a management consultancy, raised an interesting slant on new digital possibilities ‘Snooptech’, as the Telegraph reported recently, is a £2.7billion industry The increasing sophistication of digital tools, as well as the continued stagnancy of productivity in the UK, has created a market for technology whose sole purpose is to allow companies …
Category: 16. Organisations
Feb 10
Wealth gains and distribution
US Fed Chairman Jerome Powell believes our two greatest challenges for the next decade are ‘the widening wealth gap and sluggish productivity’ But Lawrence Fuller, in an article for Seeking Alpha, claims the Fed’s attempts to create a wealth effect by inflating the value of financial assets has mostly benefited the top 10%, and even …
Oct 25
The perfect working environment?
According to an article by Michael Odell in The Times, Basecamp is a US software/ tech company that supposedly runs without the scourge of 80 hour weeks, unrealistic deadlines, weekend emails and meetings Two American guys, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, run Basecamp – they’re also authors of a new book called It Doesn’t have …
Sep 29
UK manufacturing to become ‘smarter’
The UK magazine Drives & Controls has just reported that a group of UK manufacturing business leaders and academics have joined forces with the government to create the Made Smarter Commission (MSC) which aims to make UK manufacturing “smarter”. The inaugural meeting of the commission was chaired by Siemens CEO Professor Juergen Maier and Business Secretary …
Jul 16
NHS must suppress demand and cut waste
The UK’s NHS (National Health Service) is widely considered to be a national treasure – it’s also the biggest employer in Europe with around 1,500,000 staff: Healthcare services for all ailments are offered ‘free at the point of delivery’ (except such as dentistry, some prescriptions and eye tests ) to all UK citizens Poor families, …
May 19
Freelancing is good for many
Freelance employment should be used much more by most organisations in sectors which: Need certain specialist skills, but not on a full-time basis Have fluctuating demand patterns making employment of a full-time workforce to supply in good time prohibitively expensive Using freelance labour (say 20% part-time, 80% full-time) is much like outsourcing some processes – …
Mar 19
The birth of life insurance
In 1744, two Presbyterian clergymen, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to set up a life-insurance fund that would provide pensions for the widows and orphans of dead clergymen Each of their church’s ministers would pay a small portion of his income into the fund which would invest the money If a minister died, his …
Jan 29
Clusters of SMEs are a priority
According to research conducted by Opus Energy, the top three geographical areas in the UK where SMEs (Small and Medium Sized Enterprises) have productivity issues are: West Midlands North East London To compete, SMEs there are being forced to implement a wave of changes, including: Introducing flexible working Paying employees above the average wage Offering …
Jan 15
Scrap traditional organisation structures
Alison Vekshin, a freelance journalist, says: “Companies have followed a linear top-down organisation structure, but that approach is quickly becoming outdated – business leaders now favour a more flexible structure, and have seen that workers are more productive and innovative in an autonomous work environment” The traditional linear organisation chart was designed to ‘create order …
Apr 15
Passports to productivity Improvement?
Some say the ‘Productivity Puzzle’ is the result of a storm of problems affecting both supply and demand in G7 developed nations viz: Supply: In the past, major technological advances (aka Schumpeter discontinuities) enabled quantum leaps in productivity levels – G7 nations would all adopt them and improve at about the same rate – now, without more …
Apr 01
Diageo appoints a CPO
Many companies employ inspectors and quality controllers in an effort to minimise waste and boost good output volumes Very few indeed have anyone specifically in charge of productivity or widespread employment of best practices, whether from internal or external sources Now, at long last, a major company has appointed a Chief Productivity Officer (CPO) – …
Afrikaans
Albanian
Amharic
Arabic
Armenian
Azerbaijani
Basque
Belarusian
Bengali
Bosnian
Bulgarian
Catalan
Cebuano
Chichewa
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Corsican
Croatian
Czech
Danish
Dutch
English
Esperanto
Estonian
Filipino
Finnish
French
Frisian
Galician
Georgian
German
Greek
Gujarati
Haitian Creole
Hausa
Hawaiian
Hebrew
Hindi
Hmong
Hungarian
Icelandic
Igbo
Indonesian
Irish
Italian
Japanese
Javanese
Kannada
Kazakh
Khmer
Korean
Kurdish (Kurmanji)
Kyrgyz
Lao
Latin
Latvian
Lithuanian
Luxembourgish
Macedonian
Malagasy
Malay
Malayalam
Maltese
Maori
Marathi
Mongolian
Myanmar (Burmese)
Nepali
Norwegian
Pashto
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Punjabi
Romanian
Russian
Samoan
Scottish Gaelic
Serbian
Sesotho
Shona
Sindhi
Sinhala
Slovak
Slovenian
Somali
Spanish
Sudanese
Swahili
Swedish
Tajik
Tamil
Telugu
Thai
Turkish
Ukrainian
Urdu
Uzbek
Vietnamese
Welsh
Xhosa
Yiddish
Yoruba
Zulu