The productivity paradox

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people skills: The article is about sales and marketing folks. These are the "people skilled" folks who would rather spend 30 hours of a 50 hour week meeting with each other and would rather can us all than revert to more productive forms of communication - like email.

When Enron went down it was the people-skilled folks that remained in the house of cards. They had conspired against those actually producing in "360" evaluations. In effect those who produced honestly and were not likely to go-with-the-flow were "voted off the island" by the people-skilled who rigged the evaluations against them via various clicks. Enron management then canned the lowest 10 percent as scored by the evaluations.

Today no major US corporation does evaluations this way. It is considered un-ethical as well as not the American-way. Microsoft and Starbucks have what is called a 360 but it is all narrative and not scoreable. See the film Brightest Men in the Room. Which is about Enron.

Now think about how hard it is to build a house of cards when those working at American companies exercise their rights to Web 2.0 at the work place. This is the future of business in the USA. The people-skilled - those who are viewed that way because they hardly ever offend any one with email and blogs and communicate via winks and nods are obsoleted in the US business world which is characterized by Web 2.0.

These empathetic sales and marketing folks are going to need new communication skills because the meetings relied upon in the past will become fewer and fewer. Bottom line with a productive work force is that the work gets done and you spend time with folks you really care about - like family, rather than with co-workers in meetings.

The article indicates that Blogs and Wiki's and Email are negative's for worker productivity. I believe the exact opposite for knowledge workers. Think doctors, physicians, lawyers, administrators, teachers, programmers, architects, designers etc. I suspect the exact opposite also may be true for blue collar. However, my perspective is as a US based worker. The same will not be true in repressed societies where a little devils advocate may cause your employer legal problems.; Posted by: mighetto Posted on: 01/29/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use