How to increase productivity
You can increase the internal productivity of 1. production processes, 2. of the decision-making and governance processes as well 3. the external-to-the-firm productivity of the environment in which it operates.
In the first field, there are several opposed trajectories that allows for increasing productivity, intertwining micro and macro levels.
Physical productivity of a production process can rely on faster and bigger machines, performing simplified and repetitive tasks strictly matching the requirements (inputs-outputs) of further machines (assembly line).
Typically this method of increasing the number of products obtained per hour corresponds to repetitive tasks performed by low-skilledlabour, whose low wages (possibly due to a weak trade union, legal setting easing firing and high unemployment) lead to high economic productivity (which, however, will depend on the price of product sold - if it is low because of low quality and in order to address large segments of low-income television-dependent consumers, only very large, stable and predictable sales can generate enough total margins to justify the high capital investment in machines, which in turn requires television large-scale advertising: economies of scale and barriers to entry are established - possibly leading to oligopoly without new entrants). This mechanism works "well" (leaving for the moment aside the social pain, worker - and consumer - alienation and many other negative effects it involves) if GDP growth provides the macroeconomic conditions for market expansion (increase of production, increase of productivity, lower price, higher demand, increase of sold production) but it enters in tough difficulties in case of GDP stagnation and market saturation (due to the cumulative bundle at households and their low level of income leading to postponement of repurchasing). International competition (e.g. from very big countries where internal market allows for reaping economies of scale) can shift domestic demand towards imports (leakage).
An opposite way to raise productivity is creativity. A creative person can generate high value products in short time - an extremely high productivity largely irreproducible by machine. This is not only the case of people like Picasso (who stated "I don't seek, I find"), whose production has a skyrocketed value, but more in general of a society where everybody is well educated and trained in what's his and her inclinations and talents can lead to excellent and intriguing results.
High labour skill - possibly in connection with all-purposes machines like computers - generate high productivity. The economic productivities of such processes is enhanced by a market which recognizes and pays for quality and innovativeness and a business / network organisation and routines that allows for such creativity to flourish (instead of being repressed).
In between these two extremes, you would find, on the one hand, "mass customerization" and the exploitation of product platforms (crossing standard components and differentiating details) to get "economies of scope", and, on the other hand, craftsmanship where individual human creativity, skills and styles generate highly differentiated goods and services.
In the second field, many decision-making processes are dysfunctional, with hiatus between stated goals and implementation, the on-going re-definition of goals and tools, with the adoption of partial solutions which generate bottlenecks and disadvantages on other performance indicators, etc.
Raising productivity in this field would involve changing governance routines (e.g. the timing, the number and the disciplines of people involved since the very beginning on the decision, the qualification of people involved in the implementation, etc) as well as modifying the shape of the network that actually takes decisions. "Smart decisions" instead of "stupid" ones would raise group and individual productivity. Please note that in bureacracy and office work, many production processes are at the same time decision-making processes (e.g. the concession of a "permit to build" is a task for the Municipality office but at the same time is a decision changing the landscape).
In the third field, higher productivity is obtained in a country by improving infrastructure, connections, availability of supply chain services, the urban and rural spatial organization, the source, the use and the business model of energy, as we are proposing in specific fields. Less niches of privilege and higher remuneration of quality are horizontal goals for policies to raise productivity.
