Showing results by author "Michael Mankins" in All Categories

Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization - resources that are too often squandered.

Autonomy may be the single most important element for creating engagement in a company. How can anyone feel engaged, let alone inspired, if she feels that some supervisor is always looking over her shoulder? But autonomy is a double-edged sword.

Many leaders are now aware of the dangers of collaboration overload and collaboration-tool overload in the workplace. The evidence continues to mount that, for many organizations, the costs associated with meetings, emails, IMs and other forms of workforce collaboration now exceed the benefits.

Money is no longer a scarce resource. That changes everything.

The strategic underpinnings of most companies’ workforce plans should change dramatically as a result of technological innovation. Digital transformation, the industrial internet, advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, and a plethora of other innovations are fundamentally changing the nature of work. Machine learning, for example, may not eliminate many jobs in their entirety.

Twenty years ago, new office technologies like email and teleconferencing contributed to a dramatic boost in productivity. Information flows accelerated. Collaboration with coworkers became easier and easier. Productivity grew significantly faster during the 1990s and early 2000s than in previous years. Today, productivity growth has declined appreciably. Since 2007 it hasn’t even kept up with inflation.

Business leaders often think of “efficiency” and “productivity” as synonyms, two sides of the same coin.

Marcia W. Blenko, Michael C. Mankins, and Paul Rogers, partners in Bain & Company, report on how financial performance is tied to decision making skills.