Ben, in the course of responding to Steve Eskow, wrote:
>The life of a person, and the life of a business, can only be sustained
>by productive work. And productive work requires competency. And so
>without competency, there wouldn't be productive work, and without
>productive work the business would die...
The chain of reasoning above is simply not true, Ben. The "life of a
business," as you put it, does not and never has depended on productive
work. The life of a business (and the life of a person) depends on the
ability to obtain inputs. That, in turn, might or might not depend on
"productive work." On this score, no better statement has been made than
the one by Frederick Winslow Taylor in Shop Management (1911) in the
course of writing about shop management, his main means of making work
productive:
The second fact that has struck the writer as most noteworthy is
that there is no apparent relation in many, if not most cases,
between good shop management and the success or failure of the
company, many unsuccessful companies having good shop management
while the reverse is true of many which pay large dividends.
We, however, who are primarily interested in the shop, are apt to
forget that success, instead of hinging upon shop management,
depends in many cases mainly upon other elements, namelythe
location of the company, its financial strength and ability, the
efficiency of its business and sales departments, its engineering
ability, the superiority of its plant and equipment, or the
protection afforded by patents, combination, location or other
partial monopoly.
And even in those cases in which the efficiency of shop management
might play an important part it must be remembered that for success
no company need be better organized than its competitors (p.19).
-- end of quote --
Only when there is a contingent relationship between output and input
might we be correct in saying that life depends on productive work. Even
then, unless it is the dominant factor, productive work is not the chief
factor on which life depends.
Regards,
Fred Nickols
The Distance Consulting Company
nickols@worldnet.att.net
http://home.att.net/~nickols/distance.htm
--Fred Nickols <nickols@worldnet.att.net>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>