Leave Your Layers

 There has been a trend over recent years to strip out management layers - searching for the great productivity boom said to result from flattened organisations.  Delayering is said to improve communications, increase transparency  and lead to faster and better decision-making.  The streamlined organisation has higher productivity.

Like many productivity approaches, there is an inherent logic to this - but - again as with many approaches - the reality can be different.  There is some evidence to suggest that it leads to disengaged, overworked management team where mistakes van be made and errors not spotted.

Those at lower levels can feel unguided and unsupervised.  Although some may welcome this 'freedom', it is not necessarily a route to better performance.  We have spent 50 years developing management approaches and management education.  Now we seem to be dismantling much that we built.

If this is a problem - and I think the jury is still out - the problem will be exacerbated as AI eats into supervisory and managerial roles.

Don't say you haven't been warned!

Help Your Employees Help Themselves

 Some lucky employees have healthcare benefits as part of their remuneration package.

The rest have to juggle healthcare with other priorities and are subject to the vagaries of the healthcare system and any associated costs.

As knowledge grows of health-related issues, including contextual and environmental factors, people are constantly urged to change theirr diet, stop smoking, reduce alcohol intake and so on.

This is as it should be.  It is a person's responsibility to look after themself … to make healthcare, self-care.

Its helps, though, if work - and the workplace - are not harmful to health and well-being - either physical or mental well-being.

This irequires a supportive employer who creates a workplace - and working roles - that are designed to be 'health-positive'.

For theb employee, this clearly makes sense- their health is of major importance - if not the most important factor in their overall, long-term, well-being and satisfaction.

For the employer, too, there are benefits - fewer days lost to sickness and a more positive attitude to work and to the organisation.  A healthy workforce has higher productive capacity.

The health and well-being of the workforce is a significant productivity factor.

What Can AI do for Your Business?

 Most business owners and managers are taking a keen interest in AI  They have heard the hype and are now excited to learn the reality - to hear of the successful case studies of AI introduction and also the occasional failures (though failures can be under-reported as few want to advertise their failures).

But of course, the real winners are those who have read about the potential of AI to assist with, or replace, business processes and tasks - and have then explored within their own business how that potential might be realised and translated into lower costs, higher productivity, better quality or whatever.

Learning by doing, snd learning by failing, are often the most valuable - if sometimes the most painful - lessons.

So, if you wait to read about a successful introduction of AI to an organisation like yours or to a process like one of yours, you might have the chance to repeat that success. 

But if the successful organisation is one of your competitors, you might be too late.

Take the risk of being a leader.  Leaders often win.  Fewer followers do! 

The Essential Quality Your Business Needs

  Is there one? One quality which is more valuable (and therefore more necessary) than others.

Well, that is not a simple question.   All businesses need a variety and a numb er of qualities to go successful through their start-up phase and then perhaps a different (though overlapping) set of qualities for their 'stablisation' phase, their growth phase - and so on

However, through each of these phases, perhaps one specific quality is more valuable than others.  

Then, we get the situation where the external context (the business environment) makes a particular quality more important.

As of now, all businesses are facing threats from technology (and specifically AI).  Ironically the threat posed by AI is even applicable to AI companies themselves. (The biggest threat is faced by those whg don't think they are facing a threat.)

In situations where there is a generic, external threat (and especially where that threat is only partially understood) all businesses need the essential quality of remaining flexible.  This can be called flexibility, agility, resilience or ….. but it is the ability to 'read' the situation and take appropriate action.  This will depend on the market the business is in - but act it must.  

So, all businesses should currently be reading their own situation snd the external factors that are in play (and how these relate to the business and the way it operates).  You should be getting ready to act - even if tyou are not yet quite ready to act.

Is your business agile enough to survive?

Just Work a Bit Harder

  That’s what many of us think we have to do to make ourselves more productive, more effective.

But it’s not true!

I’ve repeated many times in this blog that you are not productive if you are not doing the right things.

The simplest way to illustrate this is if you have a product in your portfolio that is loosing money - for whatever reason.  If you increase the output of that product you lose more money.  Is this a smart thing to do?  Of course not.

The answer is noy complicated. You have to have a sound and secure strategy - designed to meet your long-term goals, achieve your mission.  Then you have to translate that strategy into a series of action plans designed to reach agreed targets along that route to success.  

This is really what’s meant by ‘Work smarter, not harder’.

There are all sorts of intermediary and ancillary issues to think about - staff training, development  and deployment, staff well-being, your own well-being,  looking past current priorities through improved marketing snd productivity innovation ….. I could go on but I guess you get the picture.

Think about why you are running a business (or a department, a machine, a process, etc.  Then think about what success means. Start to plan how to get there.  

Then work hard!

Comment and advice for Andy Burnham

 The UK has a new Primę Minister - allegedly  a charismatic, left-leaning one.  He is looking to change things - lots of things.   

He claims to be supportive of business but we will have to wait and see.  

What I want are policy and actions that will support businesses in increasing their productivity - support for the creation of adaptive, flexible, skilled employees, support for innovation, support for research and  development.

My one worry about what I have heard and read so far is that Andy Burnham is keen to redistribute wealth - from rich individuals to less rich ones, from the state to devolved agencies in the regions,.   There appears to be some clarity about the measures he will take to do so … but he seems less clear about creating more wealth to be part of that redistribution.

Andy …. Think of your task not as creating, and then distributing wealth - but as creating value for all stakeholders … and then think of the support you need to provide to those various stakeholders to maximise their own particular contribution to creating value for all. 

A Gap to be Filled by AI?

 Automation has long been championed as a driver of higher productivity in the manufacturing sector.  It has been very successful in some areas - most often in high volume manufacturing operations  such as automotive and computing.  We are all used to seeing robots carrying out activities such as welding car parts.

However in lower volume manufacturing operations, understandably, there has not been the same level of investment.  There is still a disconnect between the vision of automation and the technically and financially feasible creation of automation tools, flexible enough to cope with smaller batch numbers and run times.

Now there is hope that the addition of AI  and other advanced software technologies can bridge this gap and extend automation into more areas of manufacturing.  This allows intelligent control of flexible operations.  For example, vision systems allow machines to see what is happening, whether queue are forming and to assess the results of an operation such as assembly.  Overall control can be handled by a remote human operator who can monitor the images produced and adjust operations 'on the fly'.

Some technologies of interest are much simpler.  RFID tags are increasingly added to oomponents so they can be identified, located and handled more accurately.  This increase of contextual information enhances the ability of the larger systems and technologies to understand what is happening and make appropriate adjustments.

The net result is faster, smarter, more agile manufacturing systems - and, of course, higher productivity.