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A Study of 16 Countries Shows That the Most Productive Firms (and Their Employees) Are Pulling Away from Everyone Else

Harvard Business

The corporate landscape has become increasingly unequal, with the most productive firms thriving and the least productive ones failing to keep up. And second, we are able to link it to firms’ productivity and several measures of labor market policies. The Most Productive Firms Are Pulling Ahead, Across Industries.

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The Fight of The Two R’s: Robots v Redundancy

Tom Spencer

While robots were predicted and have led to significant productivity gains, there are at the same time a number of drawbacks (Taylor, 2019). This begs the question, why do we favour productivity and efficiency if the new technology is simultaneously kicking workers out of jobs and diminishing the user experience? Image: Pexels.

System 60
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Good Management Predicts a Firm’s Success Better Than IT, R&D, or Even Employee Skills

Harvard Business

As Chad Syverson at the University of Chicago wryly noted in his 2011 round-up of the evidence on what drives productivity : “…no potential driver of productivity differences has seen a higher ratio of speculation to actual empirical study” than management. And while this study focused on U.S.

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6 Reasons Salespeople Win or Lose a Sale

Harvard Business

It’s a question I’ve studied for years, as part of the win-loss analysis research I conduct. There’s a tendency to assume that the salesperson lost because their product was inferior in some way. However, in the majority of interviews buyers rank all the feature sets of the competing products as being roughly equal.

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Some Companies Are Banning Email and Getting More Done

Harvard Business

In fact, that exact conclusion is one that Thierry Breton, CEO of the France-based information technology services firm Atos Origin, arrived at several years ago. So, he took steps to eliminate what he believed were negative effects on company productivity. In February 2011, Breton announced that he was banning email.

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The Secret History of Agile Innovation

Harvard Business

A more reasonable starting point might be the 1930s, when the physicist and statistician Walter Shewhart of Bell Labs began applying Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles to the improvement of products and processes. So he began by learning everything he could about maximizing organizational productivity.

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The Real Reason Superstar Firms Are Pulling Ahead

Harvard Business

They’re more productive, as the chart below illustrates. One answer to that first question shows up in study after study: superstar firms are succeeding in large part due to information technology. They’re also more profitable, more innovative, and they pay better.