Beyond Productivity – Competitiveness or Innovation? 245.0
In a telephone conversation, a dear friend gave a reaction to the series of posts that SYNTHESiST had on productivity – on Frederick Taylor, Six Sigma, Paul Krugman on competitiveness and McKinsey and design thinking. She mentions that they have moved beyond productivity to competitiveness as the higher goal. This post integrates my views on [...]
Productivity Can Power Poor Countries to Developed Status 244.0
“The disparity between rich and poor countries is the most serious, intractable problem facing the world today.” William Lewis, Founding Director of McKinsey Global Institute, contends in McKinsey’s book, The Power of Productivity, (2004 University of Chicago), that “the key to improving economic conditions in poor countries is increasing productivity through intense fair competition and [...]
High Productivity Allows Growth and Equity at the Same Time 243.0
Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, says that in economies where trade is a small component of GDP as in the Philippines, the main determinant of competitiveness is domestic productivity. And, in my view, addressing development policy via domestic productivity at the industry or firm level, and not with [...]
IDEO Design Thinking Breaks the Productivity Frontier 242.0
Consultants’ advice on productivity improvement, as branded management products, evolve from new insights found in social science research and in empirical practice. IDEO’s Design Thinking is one such clear and late stage innovation in the business’s search for continuous productivity improvement. Design Thinking’s success and arrival in the Philippines is evidenced by entry into local [...]
Six Sigma Raises Productivity to the Effective Limit 241.0
The productivity surge in American business from 1980 through 2000 was driven by innovations like Six Sigma. Motorola first innovated on Six Sigma in the late 1980s as a method to manage process variations for quality improvement in manufacturing that, linked with business strategy, ultimately yielded improved productivity in the whole business. In the 1990s. [...]
Frederick Taylor Engineers Change for the Better Way 236.0
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) is considered the father of scientific management and first management consultant. He pioneered methods engineering and was the first to analyze work in detail and set them up as rational operations for efficiency. His innovative methods made workers in the West and Japan much wealthier than workers under Soviet-style [...]
Total Factor Productivity in the Philippines 135.0
Cororaton says TFP was negative for 35 years to 2000 Dr Caesar Cororaton, formerly of the Philippine Institute for Development Studies (PIDS), said in his paper that for 35 years through 2000, factor accumulation accounted for all growth and Technical Change (another name for TFP) was negative for most of the same period. From his [...]
