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Umair Haque
March 01, 2016
Who doesn t want to be more efficient? Pay someone else to do your grocery
shopping and clean your house, walk your dog, take that package to the post
office. Blend your food so you don t have to spend time chewing it. Don t waste
time remembering to buy toilet paper; just sign up for an Amazon Prime
subscription.
Swipe right. Tap an app. What other on-demand drone-delivered same-day
next-hour thingy do you need? Efficiency! Yay!
But perhaps our noble pursuit of efficiency is becoming something more like a
frenzied and self-destructive obsession. The latest rage in tech is apps
that call on-demand dogwalkers, personal assistants, concierges, butlers. Are
these really the game-changing innovations that they re heralded to be? Or are
they something more like the rumblings of a new feudal age, in which a small
number are masters, and the people formerly known as the middle class servants?
And if they are, should we desire such an economy not for moral reasons but
for the sake of prosperity?
Here s the problem.
Efficiency is a stagnating economy s problem not its solution. We live in
what is already probably the most efficient economy in human history. One where
you can drive your car down the super highway to the local mega warehouse store
and buy giant jars of peanuts for peanuts.
Efficiency is being able to utilize resources at the lowest cost. And boy, are
we superheroes of it. We ve mastered it to a degree that s profoundly
unhealthy: we ve beaten the costs out of our employees, people, managers roles,
departments, organizations, industries, sectors. And now we re at a point where
a lot of economic growth depends on tiny marginal gains in efficiency.
Efficiency, by itself, is not the challenge of an advanced economy. What is? At
a simple level, as Michael Porter has argued, productivity. Productivity isn t
just making stuff cheaper it s making stuff better. What do real-world
productivity breakthroughs look like? Cures for cancer, vaccines, the internet,
iPhones. They are not just minor-league conveniences; they truly and
dramatically change lives. They create new markets and new categories. They let
you do more stuff, not just get it done faster or through someone else. They
create new growth opportunities for other companies who can build on top of
them. Yet in many ways, it is precisely our ruthless, relentless pursuit of
efficiency that has cost us productivity-creating breakthroughs like these.
Today, economists are furrowing their brows and searching for causes of a
productivity slowdown.
I think the answer s hidden in plain sight. It s damned hard to come up with
life-changing breakthroughs when you re trapped 25 hours a day on minimum wage
being an on-demand insta-butler dogwalker chauffeur. And yet these services are
in demand because the people who want them are also working 25 hours a day for
the companies that make the smartphones, drone-deliver the toilet paper, and
coordinate the on-demand cars.
The point isn t to demonize the consumers or users of efficiency apps. It is to
think a little more wisely about them, to note that Silicon Valley s
single-minded focus on them isn t likely to deliver significant economic gains,
nor should such apps be lionized as groundbreaking innovations that yield
higher standards of living.
And so we re trapped in an economy that has become all about efficiency so
much so that most of us now use the words efficiency and productivity
interchangeably. Productivity is about producing not just actual, tangible
things, but true, real, value-creating breakthroughs. But the most efficient
company is just software running software. The most efficient economy is just
99% of people working as servants to the 1%.
Civilized societies should not want a class of neo-servants. Not merely for
moral reasons though there are moral reasons aplenty. But also, and perhaps
and more subtly, for economic ones. A productive economy relies on
breakthroughs which increase standards of living, and so create justifiably
worthy inequality, higher wages, and middle classes that prosper instead of
decline. Beyond productivity lies real social progress. But we cannot create
real breakthroughs if we are too busy being servants.
So the challenge for us, as leaders, investors, inventors, dreamers, and doers,
is this: not merely to settle for apps which make our lives a little easier.
But to create the earth-shaking breakthroughs which make lives truly better
and give others the chance to do so as well.
Umair Haque is Director of Havas Media Labs and author of Betterness: Economics
for Humans and The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better
Business. He is ranked one of the world s most influential management thinkers
by Thinkers50. Follow him on twitter @umairh.