Tag Archives: budgets

Folk Wisdom Reversal: Necessity Isn’t the Mother of Invention

Personal Productivity, Productivity Software, Reflections, , , , , , , , ,

This will be hard for anybody under 50 to believe, but there was a time when word processing and spreadsheets were a real productivity advantage.

Are you old enough to remember Visicalc, or maybe SuperCalc? In the very early 1980s, most business people still did budgets with paper and calculator. The spreadsheet power user was way faster than anybody else. It was a great secret weapon for early adopters. It was a huge productivity boost.

Now, of course, we take it for granted. People throw multi-worksheet budgets around like nerf balls. If you’re not done in an hour, well, what’s wrong with you?

It was the same back then with word processing. Are you old enough to remember WordStar? That was power when the competition was working with typewriters. Now, you write fast … so what? So does everybody. Go write your big email and come back in 10 minutes.

Then came desktop publishing in 1985. Can you remember Aldus Pagemaker and the first Apple Laserwriter. It was amazing. Any one person could compete with the graphics department.

And slides? There was Aldus Persuasion, replaced later by Microsoft PowerPoint. When I was with McKinsey Management Consulting back in the early 1980s our office had more graphic artists than consultants, because they had to produce the slides that amazed the clients. How long has it been since anybody was amazed by a slide deck?

Do you see what I mean? At first it’s slick and powerful, doing something way faster than the old way of doing it. And that’s productivity at its best. But soon the advances are taken for granted. The bar of expectations goes up, and you spend the same amount of time.

Which is why the saying is reversed. In these cases, it’s not like it’s supposed to be, necessity as the mother of invention. Invention becomes the mother of necessity.

Does All Of This Improve Productivity?

That’s an interesting question. Ten years ago I would have been tempted to say no, that it hasn’t improved productivity.  More recently I’ve changed my mind.  Running a company makes me sure that we benefit from the power of more detailed budgeting, and running through the daily process of management makes me pretty sure that business documents are generally better communicators with desktop publishing than without.

And the new world of social media, infinite communications possibilities, authenticity and content quality threatening to become more powerful than huge advertising budgets?

What do you think?

(Image: JuditK/Flickr cc)

Keeping Budgets vs. The Good Spend

Business Planning, , ,

So you’re moving along in your business, planning ahead and following up to stick to your budgets, and suddenly a great opportunity appears. You’ve spent the budget already. Do you overspend to chase that new opportunity?

Hint: I’m sure there’s no good general answer to that question. I think you have to answer it by looking at the specific case.

Much as I believe in business planning, I’ve never believed in the plan as constraint or chain and padlock to keep you from moving the budget suddenly to jump quick for a special opportunity.

It’s that contradiction between planning and opportunism that led me to develop the concept of “a good spend.” In the years I’ve been running a business, I always had budgets, and I always tried to manage with budgets; but I also completely understood that sometimes the opportunity is more important than sticking to the budget.

Is it a good spend? Does this project offer attractive odds of good results? Is it likely to be worth it? Are we going to regret not doing it? Can we find the money somewhere, like taking it out of some other budget, saving it from somewhere else, or even borrowing it? Then it’s a good spend.  Do it.

Budgets are plans, and plans are about planning, which is about management, steering the company, and controlling your destiny. The goal is better business. The budget serves the business, and not vice-versa.

(Image credit: Nata-Lia/Shutterstock)

Invention vs. Necessity, Upside Down

Productivity Software, Reflections, , , ,

You know the phrase:

Necessity is the mother of invention.

Right? You hear it a lot.

But what if, in fact, invention is the mother of necessity. Once the technology exists,  we then complicate things, demand more, and use up the productivity gain in raising the quality bar.

Take budgets, for example. I realize it’s hard for most people to imagine a world without ready access to spreadsheets (you’d almost have to be a baby boomer, since spreadsheets and personal computing burst onto the scene in the early 1980s). But spreadsheets changed what we expect of budgets and budgeting. The invention changed what we define as necessity. We can do the numbers now, so we demand more numbers.

Or word processing, and then, a few years later, desktop publishing. The combination completely changed what we expect of business correspondence. You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but there was a time when we wrote letters and memos and mailed them. Yes, I mean using the post office, and postage stamps. Back then, we didn’t get hundreds of letters to answer every day. The invention changed the necessity. We can email now (or tweet, or blog), so the world demands more communication.

And cell phones.  Ah yes, lots of us remember the world before cell phones. We didn’t bug each other nearly as much, back before cell phones, as we do now; we didn’t expect phone calls checking in, updating each other, nearly as much. Less communication was acceptable.

Are we more productive? Who knows? Do we have a choice on the matter? No. Technology goes one way. Whether we like it or not.