Book – Contents

‘PRODUCTIVITY KNOWHOW REVISITED’ – Contents:

1. Productivity overall:

   • Why productivity – the panacea for growth

   • Why so important for people, organisations, nations

   • Current management views

2. Scope to improve:

• • Distribution of productivity levels

  • The ‘S’ curve

  • Scope per sector

3. The Productivity Revolution:

• • Evolution of revolutions

  • Agricultural, Industrial, Service, Communication revolutions

  • Globalisation, Knowledge, Leisure revolutions

4. Productivity Drivers:

• • Management

  • Invention & Innovation – Investment

  • Competition – Luck

5. Productivity improvement process:

   • Five stage process

   • Steps for improvement

   • ‘Ratchet effect’

6. Corporate Plans:

• • Why have a plan?

  • Aims, Products & Services, Markets & Customers

  • SWOT analyses – Action plans 

7. Cardinal Measures:

• • ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ measures

  • Balanced Scorecards – KRAs

  • Cardinal model – Current measurement gaps

8. Financial Cardinals:

   • Traditional financial measures – Tangible and intangible assets

   • Unit costs – Economies of scale

   • Investors’ criteria – Stock market cycles 

9. Customer Cardinals:

• • Customer satisfaction v dissatisfaction

  • Quality sieves, internal & external – VFM

  • Price, Quality & Service Indices – PI, QI, SI          

10. Productivity & Waste Cardinals:

• • Why and where to measure

  • Productivity ratios – Outputs/ Inputs

  • Waste measures – Resource AUE% 

11. Employee Motivation Cardinal:

    • Motivation impact

    • Popular theories –, Maslow, Theory X v Y, Herzberg, Hawthorne

    • Motivation Index – MI – Job design & working environment factors        

12. Corporate Knowledge Cardinal:

• • Corporate knowledge (K) – Intellectual Property (IP)

  • Brawn v Brainwork – Knowledge workers – K ladder – K grid

  • Knowledge Index – KI = K AUE% 

13. Targets:

• • Reference periods (RPs), Budgets

  • Best practices (BPs), Waypoints, Goals, Dreams

  • Target setting – Pitfalls 

14. Productivity Analyses:

• • Gather facts & opinions – Scope to improve?

  • Review options for improvement – CBAs

  • Select specific projects 

15. Special improvement projects:

    • Set up – Terms of Reference, Timetable, Team selection

    • Solve – Fact find, Pareto, ‘Critical Examinations’, Develop solutions

    • Implement changes – Communicate, Instal, Nurse    

16. Organisation level improvement:

• • Products & Services – Ideas, Failures, Prototyping, Diversify, Divest

  • Markets & Customers – Existing & New market penetration

  • Management – M&As, T & D, WFH, Pay levels

17. Process level improvement:

• • Production v Services – Process differences

  • Process reviews – Cut waste, Optimise existing, Invest in new

  • OCTs, SPC, 6ơ, OR, WS, MS, Workflows, Outsourcing, ICT, AI 

18. Task level improvement:

• • Right outputs – Volumes, Quality

  • Right methods – Task times – ‘’Pin factory’ debate

  • Right input resources – Labour, ‘Baumol effect’ – Materials – Capital 

19. Continuous Improvement – CI:

• • CI projects – ‘Quality Circles’

  • Employee suggestion schemes

  • CI benefits 

20. National Productivity:

    • Why important nationally

    • National Outputs/ Inputs – GDP/ (Labour, Materials, Energy, Capex)

    • National productivity, prosperity, well-being

21. Global Productivity:

• • Prosperity gaps

  • Foreign aid

  • Global action needed