A recent news item says that many of the jobs that were lost during the recession may be gone forever. The report says that corporations have "found ways to be productive with less." Being productive with less might lead us to infer that the survivors of the massive job cuts of recent years have been forced to work harder to take-up the slack.
As one who spent a few decades wandering around some pretty successful corporate hallways, I find this conclusion both naive and dubious. Productivity in the Corporate world has never been a function of employee headcount. People are inferior to machines in this regard. It is reasonable to assume that a piece of machinery can produce a measurable and predictable output of product withing a given span of time. Ten identical machines should yield ten times the output. People are not so easy to measure.
The well-recognized truth about the way humans behave in organizations is expressed by the so-called "Pareto Principle" or more commonly, the 80/20 rule. The economist Pareto's observation was that 80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people. This perception of reality has extended itself to other observations - how long it takes to complete tasks, the participation of students in a classroom, etc. Basically 80% of any result can be ascribed to 20% of activity. In the business context, 80% of the work is done by 20% of the staff.
Back in the 80's, at my company, one of my bosses had an interesting variation on this phenomenon. He called it "Ziff's Law"*. He reasoned that - instead of perfection (100%), which takes 100% of the time - we should aim at something less than perfection (eg, 80% of the requirement). The beauty of this approach was that we could do 5 times as many jobs. since each job would only take 1/5 of the time.
This was business application software development. Order Processing, Invoicing, Receivables, Reporting. Pretty important functions in any company. However, the part of the new system design that always got cut was the "ease of use" interface pieces of the design, which was always the most time-consuming element for computer programmers.
Of course, the users hated the products we designed and delivered to them. The unfriendly interfaces caused them to make errors and stressed them out. The manual fixes from yesterday's errors took all morning to resubmit, Instead of fixing the system, our technical management would go to the users management and convince them that the complainers were incompetent - and that doing the 100% job would be too costly. Somehow functional business managers were convinced (or cowed) into submission.
So, none of the jobs ever got done according to the original users specifications (which took about 20% of the alloted project time to write). Nothing worked the way it was supposed to work, and everything we did was what they called FUBAR.
This is the difference between theory and practice. We were very productive from the measure of lines of code produced, but we did not make the business run better and often we made it worse. The part of the aforementioned article that I agree with, says that many of the retail/service jobs are gone forever because the customers have disappeared. For example: Hardly anybody goes to the store in the mall to purchase DVD's anymore. Mortgage agents have gone away with the dearth of qualified home buyers. And then there is the self-service sector which effectively puts clerks, toll-takers, film developers, video store employees, gas station attendants and bank tellers out of a job - just to name a few.
History indicates that there will be plenty of jobs when things pick-up again. New things are always percolating up the marketing food chain. Until a few years ago, you never heard of Kindle or Blu-Ray or IPhone, Goji berries, Teavana.
The economy continually cycles between full employment and prosperity and recession. Some jobs are lost in the dust. But there will always be always new jobs that did not previously exist.
=============================
* Probably a reference to Harvard linguist G.K. Zipf who authored "Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort."
No comments:
Post a Comment