It's always interesting to read older articles through a modern lens to help analyze how things have improved or not in various areas related to technology and productivity. For example, an article I link to below talks about the urgent need to deal with high stress levels. That's from 2018 and it might be more relevant today.
But how about a golden oldie from 2001. It's a report that was published in a publication called
California Management Review, entitled,
"Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened: Creating and Sustaining Process Improvement".
The full report is 25 pages in PDF format, but it's pretty wild to read the abstract, which sounds like it could be written today. It begins:
"Today's managers face a paradox. On the one hand, the number of tools, techniques, and technologies available to improve operational performance is growing rapidly. On the other hand, despite the rapid proliferation of such innovations and the fact that they produce dramatic success in a few companies, most efforts to use them fail to produce significant results."
And further states:
"Our research suggests that the inability of most organizations to reap the full benefit of these innovations has little to do with the specific technique. Instead, the problem has its roots in how the introduction of a new improvement effort interacts with the physical, economic, social and psychological structures in which implementation takes place."
It's also worth reading the first few pages of the report, which explains a technique called Total Quality Management, or TQM, and how it was initially viewed as a fad but proved effective when used correctly.
Could the same thing be said about AI and related tools today? Possibly.
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
