Measure Your Productivity

SOUTHWEST Airlines, in a daring parody on the current Major League Baseball steroid scandal, is running a series of television commercials featuring Nick Pudder, the winner of the Annual Productivity Award: APA ’07. Nick’s fellow office workers are resentful of his special parking spot, his private corner office, his much greater compensation and the boss’ recognition.

Nick is so productive that his dysfunctional non-believer co-workers accuse him of taking “productivity enhancers.” It’s obviously some mysterious potion that is a “steroid for the brain.”

Southwest, naturally, uses Nick’s productivity story on their Website at www.southwest.com . Go there, and you can watch the video, which is funnier and more expansive than the TV commercials—and, you’ll be getting a strong message to become more productive.

Southwest is a fun airline anyway, and now it’s fun to visit their Website. It’s genius marketing!

I better stop and explain “productivity” to Marvelle Stump, America’s least productive print salesperson.

Marv, good buddy, productivity is the output from work measured over some time span. If, for example, you spent six hours on the lake fishing for Blue Gills, and you caught 24 keepers, then your productivity per hour would be four fish and probably four Bud Lites. Let’s see. Six hours times four beers equals one case. That’s about right for Marvelle.

Back at the plant, the boss measures productivity in terms of sales per employee, and perhaps he breaks it down to sales per plant employee. He measures output from the presses in its simplest form as impressions per hour.

Measuring the productivity of machines is easy. Most of ’em have counters on the back end. So you look at the time, run the job, look at the counter, look at the time again and subtract the spoilage. Machines don’t get distracted, and, they never take a nap or go fishing.