Creative Class

This graphic from Michael Mandel’s BusinessWeek essay tells a most interesting story. U.S. economic growth over the past decade has been premised not on underlying productivity growth but on consumption, much of it fueled by the hyped-up real estate sector and construction and reliant on debt. While official numbers peg U.S. growth over the past decade at roughly a 2.7 percent annual clip, factoring some $3 trillion in excess borrowing and consumption into the picture, Mandel calculates, reduces that to a more anemic 1.3 percent rate.

Some time ago, savvy urbanists like Paul Gottlieb argued that a growing number of U.S. regions had created a fiction of growth by building new homes, malls, and industrial parks in their sprawling suburbs, even when they were not creating jobs or adding people.

Two sides of the very same coin – don’t you think?

As originally published in BusinessWeek, this is the second installment in a series about improving corporate decision-making. Part 1.

Are numerous levels of middle managers and even front-line employees simply “implementing” reflexively, like an arm told by the brain to pick up a salt shaker? When a leader at corporate headquarters formulates a decision to “win on the basis of superior customer service,” do each of the division presidents open up the comprehensive “how to win on the basis of superior customer service” manual and simply, mindlessly start “implementing” steps one through 10,000 as a choiceless doer? No, if he was only good at reading manuals and mindlessly following instructions, he would never have made it to division president.

In fact, his job is to take the relatively abstract decision mandated by the corporate office and make a set of decisions within his division consistent with that corporate decision. Lo and behold, he, too, is a brain, not simply arms and legs.

And is his EVP of service operations just arms and legs, a choiceless doer? No, she is not. She needs to take the division president’s decisions and make choices on a consistent and reinforcing basis. So where are the arms and legs? Where are the employees that are mere choiceless doers?

Stay tuned for the conclusion of this article in next week’s post.

It’s the cover of the new issue of Business Week. Martin Kenney wrote about it here more than a month ago.

BusinessWeek writer Stephen Baker has an intriguing new book out, Numerati. First there was Taylorism – scientific management, then the Fordist assembly line, Deming and quality management, the Toyota Production system, now IBM is working on statistical tools that essentially match people to tasks. I was astounded by how far this has progressed. Click here for the excerpt.

Do you think these tools will actually work to increase productivity and performance in the creative economy? And even if they do, what is their impact on creative workers and on work-life?