Technology Has Never Been Our Enemy
At various stages down the years, we have thrown out literally tons and tons of printed paper and other material.
The changes in technology in the past 30 years have been dramatic - affecting all industries and endeavors. In some cases, drawing a line under entire segments of business activity, but always creating new opportunities and fueling rather than reducing growth as a result of the increased productivity that tech and IT stimulate.
In our case, the moments at which we have had to free up space have been associated with office moves, changes in the profile of our business activities and changes arising from new ways of doing even more of what we were previously less productive at doing.
From catalogs going back to the late 1980s, through to brochures, magazines, flyers, press releases with 35 mm slides or printed paper pictures (remember them?), to SyQuest Drives and discs, Optical Drives and discs, Floppy Discs (we had thousands of them - even some five inchers) to CDs, decals, baseball caps, promotional bags and items of all kinds.
As for all the old phones (desk and cell), copiers, fax machines, computers, printers, cables, modems, scanners and screens - jeez!
The print magazine 'game' used to require so much physical reference and resource material to feed the content of the editions that we'd routinely end up having to check-in up to three of four very heavy extra bags of material on our way back from the U.S. and European trade shows that still, to an extent, set an annual rhythm to our lives.
critical dynamic ingredient
It's all gone now, of course. The last stage of the transition to what we naively think of as "modernity" at this time, will be to jettison the still quite considerable physical archive of printed back editions that occupies an entire room of our offices here in the UK. That will be tough!
As someone who has had 'ink under his fingernails' since I was a teenager, that will hurt - but in these days of a comprehensive digital online archive (www.amdmag.com and www.idnmag.com), it's not as if all that endeavor and words will be lost - not all of it anyway.
The early editions of AMD from the 1990s (European Dealer News as it was to begin with) weren't able to be digitally archived in a satisfactory manner, because we didn't have access to the necessary tech back then - it simply didn't exist. For the first two or three years, we were still using film and relatively conventionally etched plates. Once digital started to creep into the publishing business, as it did in so many others, we had an 'interim' decade or so when we would store it all on various short-lived iterations of the then latest, newest and bestest discs, drives and devices. However, the need to repeat-store and re-archive to updated devices and software every couple of years, as tech evolved, was a really dispiriting (and expensive) cycle.
Tell that to the kids nowadays and they don't believe it, you know! So, what's all this got to do with the price of cheese?
Productivity, that's what. It’s a word that everyone has heard of, and there are some people who do actually understand it. But most don't. Including most of the talking heads and so-called opinion formers for whom the long-term is defined by the next quarterlies.
The importance of improved productivity and its umbilical cord to economic growth is nothing like as well understood as it needs to be. Change is our friend. We cannot improve in any aspects of our lives without it. To resist change is to resist life. Our species depends on us seeking out and embracing change.
When business analysts, advisors, consultants and economists preach the gospel of improved productivity, it has always struck me that most do not actually know what that looks like, how to achieve it and what its results are. That's because nobody can, nobody really does.
The old 1950s and 1960s science fiction visions of a citizenry enjoying lives of unlimited wealth and leisure as the robots whirr silently and uncomplainingly about their business in factories, warehouses, shops, homes and everywhere else, doing their Masters and Mistresses bidding, were clearly fueled by a complete lack of understanding of capitalism.
In a reverse variation of Parkinson's Law - that's the one that says that work will always expand to fill the time allocated to it - thus robbing management of effective control of workflow, productivity does the opposite. It is positively Darwinian in the evolutionary pressures it brings to bear on productivity. Improvements in productivity require said 'citizenry' to do ever more work in the time allocated to it, not less, and thus and only thus, contribute to growth and profit.
These days, our humble little business is characterized by 2.5 people producing 18 magazine editions in around 44 weeks net. That's 1,152 pages in 220 days (weekends excluded - I wish!) at an average rate of 5.5 pages a day. Approximately half are advertising pages and half are editorial content pages, for which we produce around 2,000 content items of one kind or another in those 44 weeks. The startling reality of this home-spun tale of tech-driven increased productivity is that, even though it might feel like it sometimes, we are not, actually, having to work any harder than always was the case, but the tech we have is doing more, so we can do more - not less.
AI isn't about less work for fewer people, au contraire. Its time has come because it is a productivity tool that will allow society to provide more wealth-generating work for more people.
Equally, the so-called and maybe, maybe not, impending green revolution isn't about stopping us from riding our motorcycles, driving our cars or traveling for work or leisure more frequently, it is about tooling mankind to be able to do even more of all that, and to do it more efficiently, more productively and more profitably.
Only with improved business productivity, new tech and the new business opportunities that come with it will we be able to keep the cycle of growth rolling, so we can educate more children, feed and house more families and pay people more money to consume more products. It's called capitalism - read the memo!
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