Word: size
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...beginning, at about the turn of the last century, what management consultants offered was much clearer. It was called Taylorism, after its inventor, Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor called it scientific management, and it involved slicing up industrial processes into bite-size tasks and then doing detailed time-and-motion studies to determine the most efficient way to perform them. Described in hindsight as "the first big management fad," Taylorism was widely criticized--from the right as a step toward totalitarianism, from the left as soulless and alienating. It was famously parodied by Charlie Chaplin and Lucille Ball (remember Lucy...
...that business and government can say, 'These are the obstacles going forward. What can we do to overcome them?'" In the overall ranking, the U.S. finishes first (same as last year) out of 131 countries, thanks in part to top scores in venture-capital availability (plentiful), domestic-market size (huge) and cost of firing workers (low). The index focuses on productivity, not its collateral effects. Next are Switzerland, Denmark (see page 68 for a look at why), Sweden, Germany, Finland, Singapore, Japan, the U.K. and the Netherlands--some fairly usual suspects. Further down are some more surprising comparisons (see list...
...high. "There's always the debate about more government, less government, more taxes, less taxes," says Xavier Sala-i-Martin, the Columbia University economist who designed the index. "This suggests that is the wrong debate. We should be talking about what the government does and not its size...
...former advocate of big cutbacks in the welfare state: "I have to admit now, 15 to 20 years later, that the model we have found here--free education, free health care, a good financial situation if you lose your job, together with a flexible labor market and the size of Danish companies--somehow has struck something that is the answer to the challenges of globalization...
...Denmark has achieved its success has made it a darling of European social democrats and American liberals, and the country has been overrun lately with visiting journalists, academics and politicians looking for insights. One of the things a visitor discovers, though, is that Denmark's size and homogeneity--5.4 million people, of whom all but 478,000 are of Danish ancestry--are crucial to how the economy works. "We've been one small nation for 1,000 years," says Hans Skov Christensen, who as director general of the Confederation of Danish Industries negotiates the nationwide bargaining agreements between management...