We would all love to be more productive. After all, getting more output from the same, if not fewer, resources is one of the guiding principles of a growth-based strategy.
It’s why countless CPOs have told us that it will be a key priority for them next year, and, by extension, it’s why a good proportion of our community activities in 2025 will focus on the productivity conundrum.
On that subject, one thing that has always been a challenge to get right is how to measure white-collar productivity, and as a follow-on, which levers to pull to improve it over time. Which takes us neatly to Austin, Texas.
Why Austin? Last week, Procurement Leaders landed in the “live music capital of the world” for our latest event, Tomorrow’s Procurement Leader. The event offered an opportunity for senior practitioners to explore the hallmarks of successful strategy execution. We were there to discuss and explore implementation as well as the future of the function.
Kicking us off on day one was a refreshing look at productivity by Michael Mankins, a Bain partner and coauthor of Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organisational Drag & Unleash your Team’s Productive Power.
He spent time explaining just how impactful highly productive individuals are (the best software engineer at Apple writes nine times more usable code than the average, for example). He also shared how, typically, every company has the same proportion of stars versus average performers (typically one in seven). The difference is in how companies deploy those resources.
He has also developed a formula to measure all of this, which focuses on the concepts of organisational drag, employee capability, team structure, leadership and culture. And through his research, he is able to show that the best companies have more than 40% productive power than the average.
This advantage also compounds over time, so it doesn’t take long for any advantages in productivity to result in significant competitive advantage.
We all know that productivity lies at the centre of a successful strategy, but those who joined the session in Austin were left with a tangible approach for how they might approach the subject in a more structured and effective manner.
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