Preface

People by nature want to be productive. The urge to work towards something that matters is the force that gets us up in the morning, keeps us going despite obstacles, and compels us to do better than we did last time. When we see the impact of our productivity, it gives us the pride and satisfaction that we’ve made the world a little bit better.

Companies want their people to be productive as well. Engaged, productive workforces enable companies to overcome barriers and constantly get better at what they do. Productivity growth allows companies to deliver their products and services faster, cheaper, and better; provide better jobs; and contribute to the betterment of their surrounding communities.

There’s a disconnect, however, between people’s productive inclinations and what actually happens in most companies.

Most people grasp this intuitively. The feeling is that even if they derive considerable enjoyment from their chosen line of work, they are stymied by all the “other stuff” they have to deal with.

The “other stuff” isn’t just necessary drudgery like filling out expense reports. It’s also the adversarial relationships, fear of speaking out, poor coordination, lack of support, and having to do things just to please the boss.

Disengagement is widespread. In the US, according to Gallup, only 30% of employees reported they were engaged in their work in 2023. Furthermore, 17% reported that they are actively disengaged.1

This disconnect causes companies to be much less productive than they should be, and that has severe implications for our economy. The GDP growth that governments report, as will be shown in Chapter 1, is becoming less and less reflective of true productivity growth. In other words, we are in a productivity crisis.

The question is, if people want to be productive and more productivity is needed, what prevents companies from connecting the dots?

The short answer is that the conventional command-and-control management approach tends to divide people and get them working at cross purposes. High productivity, on the other hand, calls for changing this approach to create a workplace culture where all employees participate in improving work processes towards a common purpose.

The command-and-control approach is deeply entrenched, and consequently companies that have achieved this transformation are the exception rather than the rule.

I have had hundreds of conversations over the years with leaders and business experts on why this transition is so difficult to make. On the surface, the conventional methods are reinforced by business school curricula, accounting principles, corporate policy documents, and decades of tradition.

My conversations have revealed that there are deeper reasons. I’ve learned that there’s a widely held belief system that makes it difficult for even the most forward-thinking leaders to abandon the status quo. This belief system, I’ve concluded, rests on five widely held business myths that fly in the face of reality yet are regarded as immutable fixtures. We will cover these in detail in this book.

They are:

1. The Myth of Segmented Success: The productive resources of a company can be organized as a collection of independent components. The whole equals the sum of the parts.
2. The Myth of the Bottom Line: The financials tell us everything we need to know about productivity.
3. The Top-Down Knowledge Myth: Managers always have the answers and keep workers productive by telling them what to do.
4. The Myth of Sticks and Carrots : Workers are most productive when motivated by rewards and threats.
5. The Myth of Tech Omnipotence: Technology is the answer to all productivity problems.

The outdated thinking behind these myths has saddled companies with an organizational structure that stymies team productivity and fails to deliver sustainable growth.

ABOUT THIS BOOK

This book shows how overcoming common barriers to productivity can launch companies on a path to sustainable growth. The evidence comes from my conversations with leaders who have countered the traditional rules of top-down command-and-control management to build highly productive continuous improvement cultures in their organizations.

Their companies have achieved excellent financial results while treating and compensating their people well, delivering quality products to their customers, maintaining positive relationships with their communities, and doing their part to conserve our planet. These companies are role models for an approach to business where everybody wins.

The subjects interviewed for this book were influenced by various schools of thought. One is the Lean approach that was pioneered by Toyota. This has been widely promoted and was the subject of my previous book The Lean CEO.

Others attribute their success to the principles of W. Edwards Deming, who was a major contributor to Lean methods and an insightful critic of the current school of management.

The people who confront the myths, however, are not limited to those who follow these established methods. You will meet leaders who apply principles of psychology, engineering, and systems theory, and their own personal values to create alternatives to conventional management practices.

A word about remote work. There is wide debate about the individual productivity of knowledge workers who, since the outset of the COVID pandemic, have worked from home. However, as this book demonstrates, it’s team productivity that provides the game-changing results that derive from continuous improvement, and that requires the establishment and maintenance of a collaborative work culture. This is why some knowledge companies, several of which are featured in this book, maintain in-person work environments and expect employees to be there at least some of the time.

Another popular news subject is the influence of technology on productivity. Technology is a powerful enabler, but as we discuss in Chapter 7, it often fails to deliver the productivity gains that people expect and is not, despite what many believe, a magic bullet for solving productivity problems.

The book is divided into four parts.

Part One: The Productivity Challenge outlines the productivity problem and the methods for countering it. Chapter 1: Productivity, Real and Imagined shows how despite GDP growth and rising stock prices, companies have failed to deliver the productivity growth necessary to raise the standard of living. Chapter 2: The Productivity Toolkit provides an overview of the management techniques that a select group of companies have deployed to achieve high productivity through continuous improvement. These methods provide a reference point for the case studies that follow.

Part Two: Shattering the Five Myths addresses each of the five myths through interviews with leaders who have confronted them. Chapter 3: The Myth of Segmented Success shows how companies have used a systems approach to dismantle destructive elements of their traditional command-and-control management policies and create work environments of teamwork and high engagement. Chapter 4: The Myth of the Bottom Line provides examples of how companies have moved away from reliance on financial reports to reconnect with the productive forces in their organizations. Chapter 5: The Top-Down Knowledge Myth explains how companies have enabled workers to initiate improvements using their workplace knowledge. Chapter 6: The Myth of Sticks and Carrots describes how companies have built strong work cultures by creating caring work environments where every employee feels safe and appreciated. Chapter 7: The Myth of Tech Omnipotence shows how the productive power of technology is often over-estimated, and how companies have used technology to complement the strengths of humans.

In Part Three: Business Strategies for a Better World, we look at how leaders are confronting the myths to create a better world. Chapter 8: Productive Strategies for Preserving our Planet describes how innovative engineers are countering the myths with a holistic system-based approach to reducing companies’ impact on the planet. Chapter 9: A Prescription for Better Healthcare shows how healthcare innovators are taking on the myths as they fight to mitigate the current healthcare crisis. Chapter 10: An Entrepreneurial Approach to Breaking the Poverty Cycle explains how anti-poverty activists are countering conventional myth-based thinking to enable people to initiate projects that lift their communities out of poverty. In Chapter 11: Rethinking the Meaning of Disability, we see how an agency is confronting the stereotypes that conventional management imposes on people with disabilities. In Chapter 12: Joy at Work, we hear from a company that has crushed the myths in order to create an engaging office environment that instills joy at work.

Part Four: Moving Forward, Chapter 13: We Can Do This! presents the case for moving forward, with an overview of steps that companies have taken to transition their conventional management system to one based on employee engagement and continuous improvement.

People want to be productive. Yet most...