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Managers blamed over productivity
PUBLISHED: 11 Jul 2012 00:06:00 | UPDATED: 11 Jul 2012 04:14:55PUBLISHED: 11 Jul 2012 PRINT EDITION: 11 Jul 2012Jacob Greber and Jason Murphy
Treasury is blaming Australia's poor productivity performance on second-rate management practices it says are similar to those in France, Italy and the UK.
David Gruen, head of Treasury's macro-economic forecasting unit, said managers of Australian companies ranked well below the US, Japan and Germany, in part because of the many small manufacturers and fewer multinational corporations.
"Better managed firms are more innovative and have higher productivity," Dr Gruen told the Australian Conference of Economists in Melbourne yesterday.
Research found manufacturers' productivity would improve about 8 per cent if they were as well managed as those in the US, he said.
The top Treasury official's conclusions about one of the nation's trickiest economic challenges were contradicted by prominent economists Henry Ergas and Warwick McKibbin, who were also at the conference. They said the industrial relations system was distracting managers.
Business groups have argued productivity is being hampered by government regulations, high costs and labour laws that give unions too much power.
They hope a review of the Fair Work Act will lead to changes. Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten yesterday said the findings of the review would not be published until late July. Opposition workplace spokesman Eric Abetz said the publication date was originally May.
Dr Gruen said there were several causes of poorer management practices in Australian companies, including their size compared with those in other developed nations.
"Australian manufacturing has a larger proportion of very small firms with fewer than 20 employees than almost all other OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries," he said. "Family-run businesses tend to exhibit inferior management performance." He said multinationals tended to impose stronger management practices.
Manufacturing companies have been hurt by the rising dollar, which was trading last night at US$1.0229.
The comments reflect the views of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who said late last year that higher output was as much about "management capability" as industrial relations and criticised executives who blamed the Fair Work Act.
There was no evidence supporting the view that small firms had worse management, Australian Institute of Management chief executive David Wakeley said. He said a survey conducted by the institute "doesn't suggest at all that 'Pty Ltd' firms are less effective than public companies".
"Public companies were second bottom and government departments were bottom," he said.
Australia's productivity performance has deteriorated substantially since the turn of the century, but has been more than offset by the resources boom that has driven up the dollar, making imports cheaper.
Now that there are signs the easy gains from rising commodity prices may be fading, the focus has returned to productivity growth. Economists say living standards cannot improve over the long term unless businesses become more efficient.
Dr Gruen cited a study called the World Management Survey that is collecting data on the management practices of more than 9000 medium and large manufacturing companies in 20 countries. The survey judges companies based on interviews designed to reveal the extent to which they monitor themselves and use the information for continuous improvement; set targets and track outcomes; and promote and reward employees based on performance. Australia ranks in the middle tier, just above New Zealand and Mexico.
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Glenn Stevens last month told an economic forum in Brisbane chaired by Ms Gillard that Australia's political leadership should get on with the job of improving productivity and suggested well-known solutions had been ignored because they were considered too difficult.
In June the Reserve Bank published its most comprehensive study on the subject in at least half a decade. It warned the poor productivity growth since the turn of the century had imposed a big cost on the economy.
Mr Ergas, who was on the same panel discussion as Dr Gruen, rejected the characterisation of Australian management as substandard.
"When I look at those parts of the Australian economy that are growing, particularly natural resources, I see that they export managers," he said. "Australian managers have done some really innovative and important things."
Mr Ergas pointed to systematic constraints that could cause managers to become distracted.
"If the system gives them incentives to spend their time trying to manage industrial relations, then that's what they are going to do," he said.
"Bad management is self-correcting in a market economy. The firms that get high valuations are those that import good managers, and they will expand and displace the poorly managed firms.
"Bad industrial relations legislation is not self correcting."
Professor McKibbin, a former Reserve Bank board member, said Dr Gruen's speech had "no discussion of the role of government".
"That has to be just as important as the role of management," he said.
Dr Gruen said governments played a role in improving the efficiency of the economy, particularly by investing in education, training, science and infrastructure. Markets, when "left to their own devices", tended to under-invest, he said.
He said companies should be allowed to adapt to the rise in dollar, which was at $US1.0229 last night, and allow labour and capital to find the most productive parts of the economy. Companies that had more competitors, lower price-cost margins, that exported, or faced downward pressure on profit margins, were more likely to be innovators, he said.
"Pressure on profitability can provide a strong impetus for rethinking business models," he said.
"For firms that have been doing the same thing for a long time, changes in business models can be risky. They may need new contacts, new capital or new marketing; they may need to lay off long-time workers and hire workers with different skills."
Dr Gruen warned that the growth in average incomes among Australian families of the past was now facing "head-winds," including the aging population and the terms of trade, which had probably peaked.
"Against this background, productivity improvement will again become the dominant determinant of growth in Australian incomes, as it has been for most of our history," he said.
He said the gains in Australian living standards of the past decade were more easily achieved than in the 1990s, "but they were achieved in ways that cannot be replicated."
He emphasised that decisions made by individual firms would be a "key driver of future productivity growth."
with Mark Skulley
The Australian Financial Review
Read more
People | Bill Shorten, Eric Abetz, Julia Gillard, Glenn Stevens |
Topics | Employment & Industrial Relations, Politics /Federal Politics , Economy |


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subset: commoncrawl


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Tales on Rail: Day 6 – City Tour of Narbonne & Train to Dijon (via Lyon)
by Teresa
Featured Today's adventures began with a city tour of Narbonne, including many great sites in the city. We left on a TGV train to Lyon, then TER train to Dijon. The day was complete with Teresa's first experience with Escargot! Read More


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Its bad enough having to work with niggers. But whats even worse is hearing them talk about and flirt with every white girl. Most of the white girls we serve at AT&T park are beautiful yuppy girls from Hollister. Then they go to see a Giants game and some beady eyed buck with an IQ of negative 11 tries to put his lines on her. Your not allowed to flirt with the customers in a sexual way. If you do choose to flirt, make it tasteful.
Since I'm white and Turkish. They often ask me, "Yo set me up wit one of dem snoweflakes" I then explain to them that I wouldn't set them up with a white girl or a Persian girl if they gave me a billion dollars. I'm extremely protective of my own race(s) and I refuse to let them fall into the hands of some MUH DIK savage. Most Persians hate niggers with a passion, hell most Arabs hate them. After all, I hate to hear niggers trying to say that they built the pyramids or created algebra. Its a fucking insult to our race.
Is it me or do the coal burners seem to like the lowest of the low of these niggers? Then they are surprised when their man beats them. But then again, most of the girls around here like spiggers which is equally as bad.


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If you like Scrabble or charades, then What's the Word will be a great fit for your Android game collection.


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By the time the Columbus Zoo team had arrived at the holding area, it was dark. They were told that it wasn't safe for them to try to tranquilize anything because so many animals were circulating and others were scattering outward. Even when a tranquilizer dose is successfully administered it needs about ten minutes to take effect, and great care is required to establish that it has done so—impossible with so many animals running around.
When the zoo people returned to the site at five-thirty the next morning, they had been joined by Jack Hanna. Hanna—famous for his TV shows and his appearances on shows like Letterman—established his career at the Columbus Zoo and remains its director emeritus. (If you visit the Columbus Zoo, his face is everywhere—even on the Pepsi machines.) The previous day he was doing an event at Penn State, and although he'd just had knee surgery, he drove straight here "a hundred miles an hour." Zanesville held a special significance for him—he went to school near here, enlisted in the army here, spent his honeymoon night here.
After the sheriff spoke with Hanna and talked him through what happened, he gave interview after interview. It probably made all the difference. Hanna was a trusted animal advocate, and as he emotively articulated his pain at the deaths that had taken place, his unequivocal insistence that the sheriff's department had no other option than to act as they did served as a powerful antidote to the other obvious narrative—that a thoughtless small-town law-enforcement brigade had murdered dozens of noble beasts because they were too dumb and trigger-happy to think of a better alternative. "It's like Noah's Ark wrecking," he proclaimed, "right here in Zanesville, Ohio."
Forty-nine animals would be confirmed dead. There was now only one unaccounted for—a macaque. Though no trace would be found of it, dead or alive, it was eventually decided that it had most likely been eaten by one of the cats.
Six of Terry Thompson's animals survived. Three were leopards, still in their cages. Two more were the macaques kept in the living room of the house in two small birdcages. And finally, out back near the empty swimming pool, was a small grizzly bear, also in a birdcage. The house itself was disgusting. "It was the most horrific smells," says Stalf. "Garbage, and feces. Garbage bags filled with garbage that were knocked over, and the filth. I saw a pair of pants on the ground and the belt was twine. It was very sad to see—how someone clearly had lost their mind. There are no sane people that would live in those conditions."
Thompson's wife, Marian, arrived around lunchtime. She had to be convinced that the survivors should be taken to the zoo for safekeeping. "She was saying, 'Please, Mr. Hanna, don't take my children,' " says Hanna. Marian insisted on removing the macaques from their cages herself, waving off the zoo personnel's advice about the risk she was taking. She would explain that she had spent $30,000 buying them, and that she used to sleep with the young female. Her bond with them certainly seemed real. Before she opened the cage, she sang to them a lullaby, and they clung to her as she took them one by one to their carriers.
It was decided that the dead animals be buried, there and then, on the property. Mrs. Thompson chose the spot. A big digger was brought in and a hole was dug maybe thirty feet deep. The animals were scooped by the bucketload, placed in the hole, and earth backhoed over them. "Our role in life is to care for animals and to educate and inspire people about these great creatures," says Stalf, "and to see them piled in the mud...it was just a bad day, you know."
Thompson's body was taken from the scene for an autopsy at the Licking County Coroner's, where it revealed a few of its secrets. At death Terry William Thompson was five feet five inches tall and weighed 174 pounds. He had been wearing a black T-shirt, blue jeans, and white briefs. His gallbladder had been removed earlier in life, and he was suffering from severe atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. The only notable substance in his blood was Benadryl. There was gray powder residue on his left hand that appeared to be from a gun being fired. The wounds mentioned in the autopsy report, aside from the gunshot wound, begin with "a 2 1/4 inch vertical laceration on the right lower forehead and along the spine of the nose." Twenty-one other injuries, or clusters of injuries, were detailed just on the head and neck, the site of the most widespread damage. Others were noted on his torso and his legs.
And then there was what the coroner described like this: "a 5 3/4 x 4 inch gaping laceration involving the pubic region and bilateral medial thighs with the absence of genitalia, exposure of the pubic bones and adjacent soft tissue." Or, to spell it out: By the time the body was recovered, no part of his external genitalia remained. Where they should have been, there was nothing but a raw gap. That was Terry Thompson's final grotesque parting gift—a last meal for one of his animals, sometime before it, too, met its death by bullet on the sad night of October 18, 2011, near Zanesville, Ohio.
Part 2: The Animals Among Us.
For the majority of Americans who know little about the world of exotic animals, the astonishing events in Zanesville begged some obvious questions. How could a private citizen have amassed a collection of so many unusual and potentially dangerous animals in the first place? Surely he must have broken every law that prevents your next-door neighbor from secretly housing an ambush of tigers?
The answer to that first question: It's surprisingly easy. The answer to the second question is: What laws?
Though Ohio legislators are now scrambling to rectify this, the state where Terry Thompson lived is one of a handful where the regulations on exotic-animal ownership have historically been very light. Your neighbor could buy as many tigers, lions, cougars, and other exotic animals as he so desired and would be under no obligation to tell anyone. To breed or exhibit or commercially transport animals across state lines he would need a USDA license, requiring that his facilities be inspected periodically to check that they met some basic standards—but other than that there are no special checks or controls.
I will hear confident estimates of the number of big cats—tigers, lions, and so on—in Ohio that vary from the low hundreds to the low thousands. The strange truth is: Nobody knows. No one is sure how many there are, or where they are.
I set out to find some of them. These days many exotic-animal owners have learned to keep what they do to themselves, to avoid the unwanted attention of unhappy neighbors, animal-rights activists, and journalists who treat them as scary eccentrics or worse. But I find a few. Partly, I think, they talk because they're proud of what they do and the way they do it, but it's also because their way of life is under attack. They need people to know that not everybody who has a tiger or three tucked away behind their house is a Terry Thompson.
Over the days I spend visiting them I become strangely accustomed to the fact that, just around the back of an otherwise perfectly normal home in Ohio suburbia, there can be a tiger or a cougar—or, in some cases, many of each. ("Ever been this close to a tiger?" one owner nonchalantly inquires, as it nestles up against the fencing inches away from me in his garage.) I hear many tales of devotion and care that try to emphasize the ordinariness of what is being done ("We live a very normal life," one mother tells me, "besides the fact that I have alternative animals"); I hear from a man who had a bear escape and only averted disaster by luring it back into its cage with a trail of vanilla-cream cookies; I hear from a man who shared his house and bed with a leopard for nineteen years ("I know certainly if I would have done the wrong thing when she was getting possessive about things, she would have certainly killed me"); I hear from a couple who have not been on holiday for seven years because they won't abandon their six bobcats and who are planning to leave the state rather than be separated from their animals; I hear from a woman who says she will do absolutely anything—"shoveling shit in hell, sucking cock for fifty bucks"—to feed and protect her cats.
Most seem to have stumbled into it, impulsively buying a bear or lion cub without thinking through how, as one puts it, "a year from now, it's not going to be so cuddly." One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs. Even that statistic slightly obscures the situation. There may still be a market for baby lions and tigers (the consensus seems to be that realistic prices are a little higher than Stalf's figure), but there is virtually no market at all for adult tigers and lions. They are effectively worthless, because there are usually more people trying to unload them than wanting to purchase them, which is also why across America there are a surprising number of sizable big-cat sanctuaries, several with over a hundred animals.


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Jeremy Roenick Getting Legal Advice On Twitter Whether He Can Be Sued For Beating Up A Guy Who Is Giving Him Shit On Twitter
This fight has to happen. Hey JR I'm in. Like what do you need from me? I'll hop on plane to Toronto today if I have to. Donate whatever. We'll close circuit this shit. Start a kickstarter campagin. You tell me what you need from the Stool to make this happen and we'll make it happen. Because people can say whatever they want about me but there is nothing I love more than twitter brawls in the lobby of Sheraton. Let's make this happen. Get at me. @stoolpresidente. (not verified)


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Friday, July 22, 2011 by Bryan Silbermann
White House announces private and public commitments to broaden availability of fresh produce
On Wednesday I was honored to join First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House for an announcement she called "a really big deal … a game changer for our kids and our communities all across this country … to make the healthy choice the easy choice." Mrs. Obama highlighted the work of the new Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA) and shared the stage with retail executives whose companies have signed commitments to bring fresh and healthy foods into urban "food deserts," including Wal-Mart, Supervalu, Walgreens and independents Browns, Calhouns and Kleins.
Together over the next five years, these six companies have committed to provide more than 10 million Americans with healthier, affordable foods as part of a national priority to address childhood obesity and build stronger communities around profitable supermarkets offering new jobs and healthier, more affordable food in economically distressed areas. Mrs. Obama called the companies' commitments a sign that there is a new partnership between government and industry to move beyond the rhetoric and deliver access to healthier, affordable food. More companies are expected to follow.
The fresh produce industry has much to gain for this initiative to bring fresh, healthy foods – and more jobs– to so many Americans for whom a well-stocked supermarket is not a common sight. Think about what it means to have 10 million more Americans served by your supermarket customers. Consider PHA chairman Dr. James Gavin's comment that 23.5 million Americans today don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables in their neighborhoods.
All of us in the produce industry should feel proud to be part of this change wave moving across the country, bringing our healthful, nutritious products to more places. We're changing the way Americans view their food – and in doing so we're driving economic growth too. This event demonstrates the growth of collaboration we have with government to improve both the health of our nation, and the health of our industry, through greater consumption of fruits and vegetables.
If you'd like additional information about the day's events, download PMA's press conference, and be sure to view photos and other related news from Reuters and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Tags: Consumption