The Productivity Myth

For over a century, businesses have measured the wrong thing. They've tracked hours, not outcomes. Activity, not value. They've built dashboards to monitor how busy their people look and called it visibility - while the work that actually matters gets buried under meetings about meetings, approvals nobody remembers approving, and reports nobody reads.

The Productivity Myth makes an uncomfortable case: the instinct to find the easiest path isn't laziness. It's evolutionary intelligence - the same instinct that built every efficient system in the natural world, from the bee to the human brain itself. Businesses that punish it are fighting biology. The ones that learn to reward it are about to outcompete everyone else.

This book lays out a practical alternative: an employee's highest-value contribution is to make their own job simpler, faster, or unnecessary - and that should be rewarded with more time, more autonomy, and more pay, not more work.

This is a book for managers tired of running organisations nobody can explain the point of, and for employees who have spent years quietly hiding how good they are at their jobs, out of fear of what honesty might cost them.