alt Hacker NewsWhat I find most difficult about Western concepts is 'productivity.' They attach so many things to this fictional concept. It's about designing things to produce a large volume of output.
That's why so many posts on HN always include the same pattern, 'productivity.' I clicked thinking it would be about the social physics of conversation, like how to engage people socially or avoid hurting them, but instead it drifts into the concept of 'productivity.'
But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
> But no matter how much I think about it, I don't believe productivity is a solid, tangible thing, the way people talk about it as if it were
It's rooted in Taylorism / Management Science which is good at attaching metrics to the "factors of production" and correlating those to outputs.
But it doesn't have any easy numbers to attach to morale, motivation, loyalty or conscientiousness. These are all human factors that will have a real impact on your business.
Despite paying lip service to all these qualities corporations in the modern era either conveniently hide them under the rug or game them with lazy metrics that ultimately suffer a devastating collapse under Goodharts law.
Picking up a religious text will teach you more about dealing with people than these articles written by MBAs.