With all due respect to Hines Ward, who repeatedly demonstrates an ability to find the last yard, there has been a real stagnation in professional productivity in the last 5 years.    Finding reliable knowledge-worker productivity data has been difficult, but the consensus amongst a recent survey of 121 executives was compelling: 68% reported that it is “hard to accomplish the same level of work than it was 5 years ago”.

Blame it on workplace complexity.  Blame it on culture, on staff burn-out, on the economic crisis.  In truth, we’ve overloaded an outmoded style of working together that has rolled through its tipping point and is lolling about like some Weeble without a center of gravity.

The hard data that is available supports the general view that we’ve run out of ways to push more through our existing operating models.  A 2007 study by the prestigious management best practices research firm, the Corporate Executive Board, found that the years 2005 and 2006 represented the last years of professional productivity gains.  What’s more, these gains have come not by better use of information or through better decision-making, but rather through workflow automation, multi-tasking of personal and professional activities, and extending the workplace well beyond the office walls and closing hours.

We’ve all done it.  Conference calls on Saturday morning.  Midnight emailings.  Checking the Blackberry at the soccer game.  And while these anecdotal examples strike a familiar chord, they also serve as an ominous warning: We’re quickly running out of hours in the day to usurp. 

The late Peter Drucker once said, “there is nothing so inefficient as making efficient that which should not be done at all.”  He also referred to knowledge-worker productivity as, “the most important challenge of the 21st century.”  And while these two observations are more than 30 years apart, it seems that modern organizations have attempted to solve the latter by falling into the behavior of the former.

Make no mistake, the stakes are very high.  Companies that can inflect the performance of their professional staff, even by only a modest amount, have the potential to make dramatic aggregate gains.  A 2005 study by the mainstream consultants, McKinsey, showed that in the U.S., knowledge workers now account for “more than 80% of all employment,” and that “jobs involving the most complex type of interactions -- those requiring employees to analyze information, grapple with ambiguity and solve problems -- make up the fastest growing segment.”

As the economy sinks, as workers reprioritize their own values, as employees become increasingly disengaged from the ever increasing work we ask them to do, it’s time to change the game and how we play.  In the coming weeks, we’ll share the innovations we’re seeing from the front lines,  from companies like Starbucks and Marriott, who are changing the way that work gets done. 

Forget the last yard, we’re about to run down an entirely new playing field.

Rich Pople

Managing Director