โ Scribed by Werther, William B.
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Where is the cutting edge in productivity management? A strong argument can be made for the cutting edge being in the field, in organizationsparticularly those exposed to the harsh and unrelenting pressures of international competition. Because international competitors can play by different rules that arise from unique legal, social, or other differences, they can confront domestic competitors with an unexpected array of competitive approaches. The more relaxed child labor standards of the third world offer an example of particular concern to labor-intensive industries. With competitors from different cultures with different cost structures, global players face changing profitability assumptions, such as the willingness of some exporters to recoup only marginal costs. But whether they are global businesses, family firms, nonprofits, or governments, organizations that address day-today productivity issues have a strong claim to being on the cutting edge. Certainly, many of the innovations in productivity come from the creativity of practitioners solving real-life problems. Innovations at work are, perhaps by definition, the cutting edge.
Concurrently, another cutting edge exists: research. Research often defines the state-of-theart in many fields. It brings forth new ideas, the creative innovations that later find their way into the practical, applied environment of productive organizations. Preliminary research into solidstate physics, for example, gave rise to the transistor and its offspring. Theoretical work often frames the questions and sets the context for new applications of science to real-life problems. Certainly, most scientific breakthroughs in modern times flow from research to application, from laboratory to factory.
When one addresses the area of productivity improvement, however, the lines between research and application, between theory and practice, blur. The distinction between them becomes fuzzy because the research "laboratory" is a multitrillion-dollar world economy in which innovations pay off with profits and returns to multiple stakeholders. So, how do productivityimproving innovations get recognized and disseminated?
Often the practitioner encounters a problem and finds a solution, even though it may be inelegant, poorly understood, or arrived at by trial-and-error. When a field-created solution works repeatedly, it often draws the attention of researchers who attempt to understand, codify, and generalize the results. Academics or consultants typically give a label and an explanation of the process or concept that beforehand was usually little more than "that's just how we do it around here." Then, driven by the publish-or-perish dictum of academia or the need to generate clients for the consultancy, the generalized results are typically disseminated as advice, articles, or a popular book. The process inevitably repeats itself with the next noteworthy innovation-sometimes giving rise to the perception of one management fad followed by another.
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