www.glasgowchamberofcommerce.com 17
BE THE BUSINESS
John Lewis Partnership Chairman Sir Charlie Mayfield extols the virtues of improving productivity in Glasgow
S
ir Charlie Mayfield, the leader of one of Britain’s most- admired companies, wants Glasgow businesses to join him in creating a national movement to improve the productivity of Scotland and the UK.
The Chairman of the John Lewis Partnership made his clarion call on a visit to the John Lewis city centre store. Sir Charlie is also Chairman of Be the Business – the business-led organisation created to improve the UK’s productivity. He stated: “Productivity is the single most important driver of the economy – and the thing we need to get right in the next 10-30 years.” He was speaking at a Glasgow Chamber of Commerce members’ event before addressing the 460 John Lewis Partners who work in the Buchanan Galleries flagship store. He spoke of the invention of the QWERTY
keyboard. As the typewriter emerged, human dexterity was so fast that the metal arms typing the letters regularly jammed. QWERTY was invented to slow down the typist and allow the mechanical letters to fall more easily onto the paper. He said the Dvorak keyboard was shown to be more efficient but never made it into mainstream usage. He used this analogy to talk about how changing mass behaviour is a very hard thing to achieve. The key to the issue of the UK’s poor productivity, which lags behind Germany and France and is among the worst in the OECD nations, was to change behaviour because most UK firms believe they are as productive or more so than the average. “The first place to start is with people who don’t even think there is an opportunity worth going after. And yet there
Sir Charlie Mayfield, Chairman, John Lewis Partnership
is a huge opportunity. If we could improve a company’s performance by 10 percentiles, relative to other businesses in its sector, and we did that for the bottom 75 per cent of UK businesses, you would unlock about £130 billion of additional value every year.” Incremental improvement by thousands of businesses can
deliver massive productivity improvements, not just a few big companies making major gains, he said. He spoke about Industry 4.0 and how it was now an ingrained part in German economic culture, and why this had to be something that was part of the British psyche too. He said that the word “productivity” was negative and not an exciting notion for people, and they really needed to understand it was more than “having to work harder or losing my job”. He warned that failing to tackle the productivity issue
was bad news for everyone. “One of the consequences of 10 years of no productivity growth in the UK is that we’d had ten years of no growth in disposable income for the average UK householder. That’s not a good place to be for anyone... it is not a good place for citizens, the
country, and for politics and social cohesion. If it stays like that we have big issues coming down the track.” He was launching a new 12-month Productivity through People programme with Strathclyde Business School. The programme – led by Be the Business and leading UK businesses including GSK, the John Lewis Partnership, BAE Systems and Rolls-Royce – will help SMEs unlock productivity improvements in their own businesses. He spoke at the programme launch with Dave Tudor, Head of Strategy, Global Manufacturing and Supply, at GSK.
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