The myths of productivity have always fascinated me.
Not least because I received some harsh lessons on them from mentors and leaders in firms I worked in when I was younger and greener.
The first was the myth of aggregation – 15 minutes saved daily for 10,000 people is NOT a 3% enterprise-wide cost saving.
It rarely hits the P&L. In the words of a CFO that taught me a lot: “We will never see the savings. People will just have another cup of coffee or find something more interesting to do.”
Work productivity itself is not the end game. The goal is to increase revenue and/or reduce costs for the enterprise whilst optimising cash and working capital. Everything else is a means to an end.
10x Productivity Promise
A colleague recently reflected on a ‘face palm’ moment on seeing one of those adverts for a half-day AI workshop. The promise? 10x productivity. Really?
- A full week of work, done before lunch
- Ten times the output from the same team
- Ten times the P&L impact
But in reality, it’s more a case that you can buy the presentation today, but delivering it, unfortunately, is sold separately – if at all?
The same old truth is at play here – seeing a task that used to take 10 minutes that now can be done in one minute does not correlate to 10x productivity.
It is certainly not 10x economic productivity. This metric measures the efficiency with which a business turns inputs into outputs, boosting top-line revenue or shrinking costs to increase profit.
Revenue Generation and Cost Optimisation
The 10x productivity myth is based on real examples, so what’s the problem?
- The examples tend to be outliers, shared for dramatic effect.
- More importantly, tasks are not jobs and tasks are not business cycles (end-to-end processes).
- Tasks are, indeed, work, but not all work is created equal.
- Our first responsibility is to identify the work that should not be done, just eliminated, not automated.
The other fascinating challenge with changing the shape of work is, to quote Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” There are always unanticipated consequences, usually related to the human factor.
We need to focus less on the need for fewer workers (the implication of greater productivity) and more on increasing customer value to drive top-line revenue. Also, eliminate unnecessary wastage and cost through genuine efficiency and effectiveness.
IKEA Service Process Impact
The recent news of IKEA’s experience (Inc, 2026) is an interesting example. Granted, by answering product questions and offering recommendations, ‘Billie’ improved customer service and satisfaction and reduced waiting times and overheads.
However, by focussing on the customer service process and impact – and what the chatbots couldn’t provide – IKEA also identified previously hidden customer demand signals.
They made the customer service process more efficient with AI-powered automation. That enabled them to create a new $1.4bn revenue stream to capture unmet customer demand. All delivered by 8,500 newly retrained customer service team members, now as revenue-generating interior design advisors.
As this illustrates, work needs to be reconfigured end-to-end, not by fixing individual symptoms.
It has become clear that genuine enterprise P&L impact requires business transformation beyond purely optimising tasks or groups of functional silo activities, or even polishing with liberal doses of AI.
Value Stream Perspective
Enterprise P&L impact requires a value stream or end-to-end business process perspective. These business cycles operate across all units of our business, with key tasks often out of sight.
This leaves blind spots, often reinforced by our silo way of thinking about responsibilities and performance measurement. However, silo thinking does little to drive enterprise value and P&L impact.
It turns out that success in driving genuine enterprise P&L impact with digital and AI-enabled transformation is a lot more nuanced. And the 10/20/70 Rule helps to guide our thinking:
- 10% Algorithms
- 20% Tech and Data
- 70% People and End-to-End Process
Real transformation hinges on people and the end-to-end process. Without strong, people-centred process strategies, even the best AI initiatives can, and will, fall short.
After all the hype over AI, only one in four companies (IBM 2025) (at best) have cracked the code and are finding real value. Most are still stuck, unable to translate experiments into real business impact.
The supply of seductive ideas has boomed in the age of AI, but the ability to execute them most certainly has not.
Consider Solutions focus on delivering business performance outcome improvements, not just reports, that bring tangible P&L, Working Capital, Balance Sheet and Risk Management impact – through a proprietary end-to-end (E2E) business process approach and smarter use of technology in the context of human behaviour, data insights and decision support. The ‘Pareto Principle’ is a key to success in all of these initiatives; the 80/20 rule by which 80% or more of desired outcomes can be delivered with 20% or less of the cost, effort and cycle time.
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