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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mike M2 who wrote (16434)	3/7/2002 9:40:01 AM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 74559

People are trained in schools to make use of numerical tools to evaluate the real world. But accountants and statisticians know the impact of the result of their numerical wizardry. So they tend to make then show what actually the users of the results want to see. That said, I always look to real life to see what it shows. For instance. If we look at productivity. For me productivity will have an impact in any recovery. How could I show that? If we look at what technology have done to the economy, we will notice that technology displaced blue collars. And did so by taking over dangerous, repetitive and the skilled work replaced by numerical controlled machines. Now if we look to the application of technology to the world of the white collar it hadn't show the impact. I tried to understand that without success. That until I heard of the new CEO of the Dutch Telecom company explaining how he reached the peak in his career. He said he took over the Postal administration and found a problem: It was over-manned. He needed to fire 50% of the workers. But he was clever. He applied technology 'com gusto' to the postal administration. So with its success, he didn't have to fire people en masse. Aha! I said, that explains why we don't see productivity gains. The gains are going to pay salaries of people who are kept on board. Now with the post 911 firings, it may be the case that the white collar will face the same fate of the blue collar faced in the eighties.