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By: Robert F. Abbott When Phil hires a new helper for one of his construction projects, he first watches to see whether or not the newcomer has the right attitudes and habits to keep him as an employee. And, if the newcomer meets expectations,' Phil introduces him to his philosophy about work by telling him the woodcutters story. Two woodcutters who are working together for the first time, set off in the morning to cut down trees. One woodcutter works very hard, and aside from a couple of breaks, works steadily all day. The other woodcutter, though, seems to take many more breaks, at least one every hour. So the first woodcutter expects he'll have cut down many more trees by the end of the day. But, when they quit for the day, the first woodcutter finds, to his surprise, that the second woodcutter has done more, despite taking all those breaks. And, in his frustration, the first woodcutter wonders out loud how the second woodcutter did it. The second woodcutter couldn't help but hear the first woodcutter's question, and replies, 'Yes, I take many more breaks, but every time I take one, I sharpen my axe.' Phil uses this story of the woodcutters to explain his ideas about productivity, and he doesn't relate it to the productivity which economists refer to in their statistics. Phil thinks of productivity in a very immediate way: how many nails you can drive in one hour, for example. The economists are talking about the same thing, only they're talking about it as the sum of many millions of businesses and organizations, so they're talking about productivity in an abstract way. Whatever the case, productivity simply refers to the amount of value you can get from labor, land, or capital (invested money). As we'll see in the next section, Phil's income goes up when he (and his helper’s) productivity goes up. Increasing productivity across a whole nation is also good news. It means everyone in society becomes more prosperous, that everyone (or almost everyone) will have more money to spend or save. Increased productivity can also mean lower prices. For example, if carpenters and home building companies increase their productivity, then house prices will go down. Generally speaking, though, consumers, owners of businesses, and workers in those businesses all share productivity gains. And what about people without job? Well they often gain, too, because when businesses owners and workers make more, they pay more in taxes. In turn, that makes more money available to governments for social programs. Having heard all that, you may be skeptical, thinking your prosperity hasn't gone up much, if at all. But you'd be wrong. Productivity has gone up, and gone up a lot over the past two hundred years, and especially over the past 50 years. It may be invisible to most of us, but productivity is one of the silver bullets that have given us our prosperity and so many of our choices.
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More Articles:1. The Leadership Imperative: Making Your Leadership Your Life PERMISSION TO REPUBLISH: This article may be republished in newsletters and on web sites provided attribution is provided to the author, and it appears with the included copyright, resource box and live web site link. Email notice of intent to publish is appreciated but not required: mail to: brent@actionleadership.comWord count: 468Summary: The author describes a vision of leadership that you can use throughout your career. It's a vision that will also help enrich your life. The Leadership Impe… 2. Employee Discipline: How to Nip Problems in the Bud By Marcia Zidle Are you uncomfortable with delivering disciplinary action, even involving employees you know deserve it? You're not alone. Disciplinary action is one of the least favored tasks a supervisor must occasionally perform.Disciplining employees is so dreaded by so many supervisors that many look the other way when trouble develops, perhaps in the hope that the matter will correct itself. But most of the time it doesn’t – it tends to go from bad to worse. Rather than allow that to happen, take positi… 3. Middle Managers Behaving Badly – How To Stop This Damaging Your Results By Bill Robb More and more I hear and read about a looming crisis of leadership at the middle management level and the inevitable resulting increase in, poor performance, accidents and production mistakes and hence declining profits.I’m afraid to say these observations are not just rumours. In my own work as a management consultant I’ve noticed a distinct increase in negative behaviours in many middle managers in all sorts of companies.In this short article I’ll explain what I mean by “negative behaviours”… 4. Quick Tip - Effective Meetings Have a Complete Agenda Most agendas for a meeting look like this.* Budget* Payroll* Staff* Sales* VutszxtnSome people would tell me, 'That's a perfectly good agenda. I know what all of those things mean, except, uh, 'vutszxtn'.' The point is, vutszxtn means as much to you as the other terms mean to the other participants. For example, does budget mean increase the budget? Plan a budget? Report on the budget? Reduce the budget? Complain about the budget? Make fun of the budget? Or what?An agenda like the one above coul… |
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