Past Posts

Over 400 posts of articles have been published on this website to date

To help readers find those of specific interest, they have been categorised into the 21 sections used by our new book ‘Productivity Knowhow’ Revisited – see below

Each individual post can be accessed from the list in the right hand column of the Home page

BOOK 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, wellbeing

21. Global productivity:

  • Prosperity gaps

  • Foreign aid

  • Global action needed