Productivity

Virginia Postrel has a good post on productivity. Apparently it's been increasing at a phenomenal rate despite the choppy economic picture of the last 3 or 4 years. There are lots of reasons for it, such as improved use of existing technology, pushing people to work quickly, etc.

The thing that I think about, regarding my own company anyway, is that we have no process at all. We are profitable(or so they tell us) and we seem to have a good record in the industry, but I know from working with the systems that what we have as an operational support system is complete garbage. It's a slow, unresponsive, practically useless piece of junk that we paid too much money for. What really makes the company keep going is that most of us know how to work without the thing, and at the same time we know how to work with it just enough that it looks as if we are making use of it.

So I'm wondering how many other companies are like mine. They've just fired their way down to the core competency, and then let those folks do whatever it takes to get the job done. Whereas before the downturn they might have put more restrictions on people and insisted that they follow the "process" no matter how idiotic it was.