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Can Buying Groups Save You Money?
Let me give you a brief history of Group Purchasing Organizations (GPO). They have been around for decades. Do you know what types of businesses get the best pricing on all of the goods and services they purchase? The answer is healthcare...
Leasing 101 - Leasing works for any type of business
Leasing 101 Leasing works for any type of business. Leasing defined A lease is a contractual arrangement in which a leasing company (lessor) gives a customer (lessee) the right to use its equipment for a specified length of time (lease term) and...
Seminar Success Strategies...How to Action What You Learn
It's no secret that many people who attend seminars, workshops and conferences have great difficulty in implementing the ideas.
They get all hyped up and excited on the actual day, write a book full of notes and proclaim to everyone in...
Small and Medium Business in South Africa
The South African small and medium business environment has matured over the past year and currently creates a very good climate for entrepreneurs, direct foreign investment and emigrants. This is supported by all well-recognised business...
Starting your Own Autopilot Home-Based Business
It's a cruel world out there. Hundreds of thousands of hard-working Americans lose their job every year. Tragically, ordinary people get disillusioned by sleeping on the idea of a "dream job" when they could cash-in tremendously from the...
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Productivity: So Many Small Things
We rarely see stories or articles about productivity in the newspaper or on TV. When we do, it’s usually just another story on the economy that defies understanding.
Which is too bad. Our prosperous standard of living arrived, in large part, because of the ability of companies and organizations everywhere, and for the past several hundred years, to increase productivity.
Productivity simply refers to how much labor or money it takes to create a product or service. If a carpenter can build one house in one month, then the carpenter’s productivity is one house per month. If the carpenter gets new tools or new ideas and does the job more quickly, his productivity goes up.
Every time productivity goes up, the carpenter’s standard of living goes up, too (generally speaking). Here’s another example of how productivity works:
Suppose a British company discovers how to make steel products just a tiny, tiny bit harder. Then a company in the U.S.A. uses this process to make ball bearings that last an average of 423 days rather than 420 days, when they're used in truck axles.
A trucking company that hauls washing machines from Mexico City to Montreal, Canada buys trucks with these better bearings. That means it can haul a load for a few dollars less. In turn, this means the cost of each washer goes down by a few cents.
But, what's a few cents less when you're paying hundreds of dollars for a new washer? What's more, you'd probably observe that you only need a new washing machine once every fifteen or twenty years.
That’s true, but this productivity
improvement is just one of the many millions of small improvements we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution (and some improvements even predate that period).
We also need to remember a couple of other points. First, productivity improvements have a cumulative effect, which is to say they build on each other to multiply the gains. Second, productivity has increased at an unprecedented rate for the past half century.
The most obvious example sits on your desk: a personal computer. Not too many years ago, we prepared letters on a typewriter, one letter at a time. Now, using a computer and word processor, we can select a stock letter from a collection that covers most common issues, add a name and address using mail merge, send the document to the printer, and in seconds a completed letter lands on our desk.
The personal computer, though, is simply the tip of an iceberg. Almost everything mechanical or electrical works better or works faster than its counterpart of 50 years ago. We haven't heard about most of those improvements on the news, for obvious reasons. Individually, they meant little except to people who were directly affected; but collectively they've revolutionized the way we work and live.
About the Author
Robert F. Abbott is the author of the forthcoming book, Ownership Revolution: How Working People are Buying Up Big Business, from which this article is taken. If you contribute to a pension fund, mutual fund, or whole life insurance policy, you're probably one of the new owners of the big corporations. Find out more at http://www.TheNewOwners.com .
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