Positive Management

Chapter 2

Rethinking Productivity

The beating that businesses and governments took from severe economic recession provided, as hard times often do, an opportunity to review and reassess our assumptions about how to make money and sustain our organizations in a free-market system. One of the assumptions most in need of review is organizational productivity. We tend to think of productivity as something that we “get out” of people in some perpetual contest to tip the exchange-of-consideration equation more in favor of ownership (or, in the case of public-sector organizations, nonemployee stakeholders). We often attribute increases in productivity to external conditions that lead us to reduce staff and thereby obtain higher productivity from each ...