Microsoft Office could be a bigger productivity drain than Candy Crush
&gt; <i>Well-paid middle managers with no design skills take far too long to produce ugly slides that nobody wants to look at. They also file their own expenses, book their own travel and, for that matter, do their own shopping in the supermarket. ...it is partly bad organisational design: sacking the administrative assistants and telling senior staff to do their own expenses can look, superficially, like a cost saving.</i><p>Not just superficially -- it <i>is</i> a cost savings, and a net benefit to society. It&#x27;s the realization that slides <i>can</i> be ugly and still get the point across just as well. And doing my own expenses when everything&#x27;s charged to a company card takes all of 5 minutes for a weeklong trip.<p>This means we can free up talented designers to improve mobile apps used by millions instead of presentations seen by ten, or administrative assistants to work where they&#x27;re most needed, such as in health care.<p>I also don&#x27;t know where the author gets his claim that average productivity growth has been <i>negative</i> since 2007 -- a chart here [1] for the US shows it&#x27;s been positive for 18 of the past 21 years, and the average is clearly positive too. And while there are certainly plenty of theories as to why productivity <i>growth</i> might be decreasing, the idea that it comes from ugly presentations not only has zero supporting evidence, but seems almost laughable.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;946675&#x2F;us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in-2016-and-economists-arent-sure-why&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;946675&#x2F;us-productivity-growth-was-negative-in...</a>