The one true test?

Ask a businessman (or woman)about productivity ... and you are likely to get an answer about profitability. Of course - for a business - whether it is profitable is the one true test ... but it tells an incomplete story.

A real businessman wants to understand tomorrow's profitability, not today's ... and that is far more likely to be revealed by looking at today's productivity.

And increasingly, as we look to address the needs of a variety of stakeholders, our businessman needs to look at economic productivity, social productivity and environmental productivity. We need to look at each of these in the longer term.

It seems as though over the last few years many organisations have looked at only short-term economic productivity ... and today we are all paying the price.