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The Rising Tide of Productivity

‘Productivity isn’t everything,’ wrote economist Paul Krugman, ‘but, in the long run, it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker.’ Productivity is simply a ratio of outputs to inputs. We would all like to learn how

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Systems thinking: the primacy of the whole

Recently, I wrote about Asset Constraint Management and the capabilities required to achieve remarkable results. None of that will amount to much if you don’t encourage a systems thinking mindset with behaviours to match. Systems thinking is at the heart of what we do, encapsulated in our mantra: ‘know the whole, focus on the constraint’.

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Competing by managing asset bottlenecks

Peter Drucker quipped, ‘Business has only two functions—marketing and innovation.’ Early in my career, I focused obsessively on innovations in productivity. The really hard part, though, is convincing an organisation that a better way of delivering greater productivity exists. Allow me to try.

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mediumSharing stories

The first two parts of our series on storytelling focused on the overarching narrative: the big stories we tell ourselves. In this final article, we look at smaller stories—the kind we tell every day—which can add up to a shift

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Five essential steps to your goal

No one likes spending money on maintenance. Take your car in for a service and you’re not only left with no transport, you have to pay for the privilege to boot. In fact, there’s only one thing worse than planned maintenance. An unplanned breakdown. I recently had the chance to talk at one of the

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Working between the silos

What are you accountable for? And what kind of authority do you have to properly acquit that accountability? Whom do you report to? How do you get inducted into the role? Who decides which tasks are to be done, of what type and by when? Everyone craves clarity in their role. We want to know

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