William F Heitman - The Knowledge Work Factory: Turning the Productivity Paradox Into Value for Your Business

Copyright 2019 by William F. Heitman. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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INTRODUCTION
Just Another Day at the Office

CHAPTER 1
Where Is White-Collar Waste Hiding? In Plain Sight!

What do a financial-services company and a tire manufacturer have in common?

Why do 20 percent of earnings go missingand unnoticed?

Test your knowledge: three spot the waste stories.

Introducing the concept of virtuous waste.

CHAPTER 2
Did You Notice That Your Most Valuable Assets Have Shifted?

Buried in Babylon: the difference between tangible and intangible assets.

Competencies: mundane work activities that are worth a fortune.

Why your greatest assets remain unrecognized and underproductive.

How unique is your business? Understanding the anti-standardization bias.

CHAPTER 3
How We Got Here: The Long Journey to Myopia

Thirty thousand years of productivity improvementsin just five minutes.

Should technology drive work activitiesor the other way around?

Why has knowledge work failed to improve when other work has wildly succeeded?

The Industrial Revolution, big rocks theory, and the productivity paradox.

CHAPTER 4
Findingand FixingYour Businesss Biggest Blind Spots

Perceptive biases that trick your brain into giving you incorrect information.

Logic biases, flawed rationalizations, and profit-robbing false trade-offs.

The principle of least effort: not as simple as it sounds.

Powering past your blind spots: techniques for seeing the unseen.

CHAPTER 5
Transforming Your Business into a Knowledge Work Factory

The immutable elements of industrialand knowledgework.

Three perceptual errors that make the brain ignore these elements.

The better mousetrap dogma: market-based suppression of business innovation.

Touring the anthill of knowledge work operations.

CHAPTER 6
Whats the Capacity of Your Knowledge Work Factory?

The rise and (mostly) fall of org charts: an unmatched masterpiece from.

How knowledge labor-cost data go missingand where theyre hiding.

Why knowledge workers believe theyre exempt from productivity management.

Five lessons from a century of failed organizational theories.

CHAPTER 7
Recognizing the Hidden Products Your Knowledge Workforce Builds

Taking inventory: the overlooked products your knowledge workers create every day.

How false complexity erodes productivityand impedes standardization.

Lessons from the factory floor: adapting product-based management to knowledge work.

A finance department case study: best intentions, worst outcomes.

CHAPTER 8
Building Your Own Knowledge Work Factory

Beginning with basics: capacity and work products.

The 1914 productivity death match: Frederick Taylor vs. Henry Ford.

Separating the management of work from the performance of work.

Reducing variance to boost productivity up to 30 percentwithout technology.

CHAPTER 9
Optimizing Your Knowledge Work Assembly Lines

The five maybes: a simple path to business-process improvement.

How to outachieve the overachievers to reach better-than-best-practice performance.

Why todays knowledge work is tragically under-automated.

Documenting and managing predictable patterns in business processes.

CHAPTER 10
Analyzing and Simplifying Knowledge Work Activities

Overcoming the three challenges to activity-level knowledge work improvement.

The periodic table of knowledge work activities.

Which work activities are unique? Shattering a longstanding misperception.

Tales of terror: real-world examples of hidden waste (with happy endings).

CHAPTER 11
Turbocharging Your Knowledge Work Factory

Doubling and redoubling productivity, one wrench-turn at a time.

A spreadsheet/robot smackdown.

The Activity Cube: reconciling four views of operations.

Vendor hype versus reality: how much can you actually automate?

CHAPTER 12
Managing Industrialization

Counterintuitive strategy: how to win by playing not to lose.

Crossing the void: three strategic milestones.

Building your knowledge work factory: a two-phased approach.