Friday, July 12, 2002

survival instincts and productivity At a previous job, I listened to strategy briefing by a guy who was a long-time management consultant. He'd been around during the days of Re-Engineering. The basic idea of re-engineering was that if you look carefully at the processes by which your company does business, you can rejigger and stream-line things to make the processes more efficient. He done this at several places, including in a retail bank. There, he said, the problem wasn't that you couldn't make things more efficient but that when you *did* make a process more efficient, the excess capacity (i.e. people) would just pop up some up somewhere else and make *that* process less efficient -- net-net: no increased productivity (never underestimate the power of personal survival instincts). He said you couldn't realize the gains until you got a hold of the tellers and shot them (his words, not mine). So, here's a what-if: what if for the last 20 years, we've been racking up productivity gains as a result of our investments in information technology, but they have been chewed up by people exercising their innate abilities of self-preservation. What will happen now that there's big pressure to lower prices and boost productivity? The big squeeze -- nice in the long run, probably a little ugly in the short term. 4:39:18 PM

Business Week.  Accelerating mutual fund redemptions shows that we have finally reached the classic bear market capitulation phase.  Another couple months of this and we could finally see a bottom in the market.  Excellent time to start getting funds together to begin investing again. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] probably a good marker for the beginning of the end... no telling when the end of the end will be... if the bad corporate news continues and we see more terrorist activity, maybe not too soon... a couple months seems optimistic. 4:24:28 PM

making money on infrastructure Anarchy & Infrastructure. Mike is right, Doc Searls' Anarchy & Infrastructure presentation is excellent. [Blogging Roller] curious, maybe not excellent. I think he's got IBM right tho. 4:21:32 PM