Look around at the signs of a failing economy; the daily headlines about layoffs, bankruptcies, collapses, and even just plain theft on an unprecedented scale. What are the values that brought us to this place?

One of the false idols is productivity.

American business has a fetish for productivity. We hear all the time about how productive our workers are, that Americans have the highest productivity in the world. Hasn’t really helped the people laid off or who lost their pensions, obviously.

Just on it’s own, productivity for it’s own sake doesn’t really have any value. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a slew of things that I value a lot more; creativity, quality, innovation, and customer service.

If you have some core value, then actually getting that value out there makes perfect sense. Composing a great song in your head doesn’t help anybody. A idea for a movie doesn’t mean much of anything if you don’t make the movie. A business concept is not a business.

Is your problem producitivity? If it is, by all means fix it. But the problems that most businesses face right now isn’t that they aren’t producing enough. If you stop and think about it, it might really not be your problem, either.

I’m a big beleiver in the power of deadlines for getting creative work done. But goal setting isn’t the same as the productivity fetish.

The way productivity is pushed in American business seldom relates to other values. There’s no balance. Instead, it’s treating people like machines, whose output can be easily measured by the number of widgets they produce per hour.

One of the most dangerous things about this unbalanced focus on time filling is that it keeps people from actually being able to think. Thought, innovation, and inspiration require a little bit of breathing room. Like fire, creativity needs both air and fuel.

The productivity fetish smothers thought in the name of staying busy. And sometimes everyone at a company is so busy staying busy that they don’t even realize that the entire enterprise is doomeed.

“Row faster!” doesn’t really make sense when your ship is heading towards the edge of a waterfall.

But if you focus mainly on the idea of being ‘productive’ and decide to measure the rowers, how many strokes per hour they make, and put the improvement over yesterday’s statistic’s into a nice colorful chart…well, it sure seems like you’re being a productive manager.

Or maybe you’re really just heading for disaster faster and more efficiently.