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 . 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 . critical dynamic ingredient
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 !
Robin Bradley
Co-owner / Editor-in-Chief robin @ dealer-world . com