by Charles Plant | Oct 26, 2011 | Uncategorized
I think pencils are much like socks. You know the old problem of the dryer eating your socks. I think the dryer might also be eating my mechanical pencils. I just can’t figure out where they’re all going. I know I have about 10 of them but today I wasn’t able to find even one. The thing is, they seem to disappear one by one, only to reappear a while later one by one. So I’ll start with 10 on my desk and a few days later I’ll have none. Then lo and behold they start coming back and ending up on my desk. Where have they been? Were they on vacation or in the dryer? I try to be so organized about everything else, I can’t understand why I’m so disorganized about my pencils. If anyone knows of any good management techniques for dealing with errant pencils please let me know as I’ll build a whole training module on the subject. After all, I can’t be the only one having this problem.
by Charles Plant | Sep 23, 2011 | Uncategorized
Some remarkable statistics in the Globe and Mail last weekend got me wondering about productivity. While the technology revolution has been good for productivity, it may not be true that productivity has been good for the average worker. Right now, about half of the 14 million or so Americans who are unemployed, have been unemployed for more than 6 months. Furthermore, recent census statistics have shown that the median income for working-age households fell 10 percent between 2000 and 2010, even as women worked more hours. The real nail in the coffin is that the average real wage for working men is now lower than it was in 1973. I suspect that the technology revolution has really only benefitted a few of us and it has widened the income gap as it resulted in the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.
by Charles Plant | Jul 7, 2011 | Uncategorized
While it has taken only 30 or so years to move from an industrial economy to the knowledge economy, the change to an industrialized world was not as fast as one might think. It took a long time for James Watt’s steam engine to catch on so that the move from a cottage style workplace to a modern industrial society took 100 years from about 1800 to finally reach fruition. The biggest change occurred because productivity increases depended much more on efficiently organizing processes than it did on individual skills. As opposed to the handicraft tradition of apprentices, with efficient production processes, one could take a relatively unskilled individual and turn him or her into a productive worker in a relatively short period of time. It also meant that since dexterity and small hands became important in a mechanized environment, early mills could profit from the employment of relatively inexpensive women and children.
Perhaps this is why we are leaving so many people behind in the move towards a knowledge economy. Our change is coming at a much faster pace while the transition to highly skilled knowledge work is very complex and time consuming.
