The new productivity challenge

오늘은 MBA 과정에서 자주 접하게 되는 HBR Case 중 하나인 "The new productivity challenge"에 대해서 알아보겠습니다.

 

The new productivity challenge

The single greatest challenge facing managers in the developed countries of the world is to raise the productivity of knowledge and Service Workers.

This challenge, which will dominate the management agenda for the next several decades, will ultimately determine the competitive performance of companies.

The most pressing social challenge developed countries face, however, will be to raise the productivity of service work.

Unless this challenge is met, the developed world will face increasing social tensions, increasing polarization, increasing radicalization, possibly even class war.

The revolution in productivity set off by Frederick W. Taylor in 1881 was to improve the efficiency of industrial work. And his efforts, in turn, sparked the revolution that allowed industrial workers to earn middle-class wages and achieve middle-class status despite their lack of skill and education.

By 1930, when according to Marx the revolution of the proletariat should have been a fait accompli, the proletariat had become the bourgeoisie.

 

The first thing we have learned is about what does not work.

Capital cannot be substituted for labor.

Nor will new technology by itself generate higher productivity.

In making and moving things, capital and technology are factors of production, to use the economist's term.

In knowledge and service work, they are tools of production. The difference is that

a factor can replace labor, while a tool may or may not.

Whether tools help productivity or harm it depends on what people do with them,

on the purpose to which they are being put.

 

 

The planning people work through only three questions for each of the company's businesses:

What market standing does it need to maintain leadership?

What innovative performance does it need to support that standing?

And what is the minimum rate of return needed to earn the cost of capital?

Then the planning people work with the operating executives in each business to map out broad strategic guidelines for achieving these goals under various economic conditions

The results are far simpler and much less elegant, but they have become the “flight plans" that guide the company's businesses and its senior executives.

 

Defining the task, concentrating work on the task, and defining performance, these three

steps will produce substantial growth in productivity

The last component of working smarter is a two-part lesson;

First, continuous learning must accompany productivity gains.

Redesigning a job and then teaching the worker the new way to do it,

which is what Taylor did and taught, cannot by itself sustain ongoing learning.

Training is only the beginning of learning.

The greatest benefit of training comes not from learning something new but from doing better what we already do well.

Equally important is a related insight of the last few years: knowledge workers and service

workers learn most when they teach.

The best way to improve a star salesperson's productivity is to ask her to present "the secret of my success" at the company sales convention.

The best way for the surgeon to improve his performance is to give a talk about it at the county medical society.

We often hear it said that in the information age, every enterprise has to become a learning institution.

It must become a teaching institution too.

 

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