Thoughts on Productivity

Thoughts on Productivity

Productivity is directly related on creativity.  More than anything else, man’s productivity is the nearest instance that he could approximate God and his creative powers.

In service department, productivity is measured by the services rendered.  In a manufacturing based company, productivity is measured by the number of items actually produced by the factory.  For a book writer, productivity is measured by the number of books written and for a sales representative, productivity is measured by the number of sales acquired.

In the academe, productivity is predicated on so many criterions that I already lose sight with what is important.  Before productivity was measured by marketing (getting students to enroll in your university), research made and written and community service.  By and large, this is a superficial way of looking at productivity because in the academe, the business is teaching and learning.  Teaching for the faculty and learning for the student.

But how does one measure teaching and learning?  Do we measure the teaching done by the faculty based on student evaluation and learning on the grades acquired by the student?

Productivity is so many things in so many people but going back on the initial concept of productivity as an approximation of god and his godlike powers, such I believe is nearer to the mark of actually defining productivity.

In Wikipedia, productivity is a measure of efficiency of production.  Productivity is equated with outputs as opposed to the inputs.  But this a myopic way at looking at things, because “making things happen” is also a form of productivity.  Yes, it is intangible but such is also a platform of productivity.

Looking at my professional portfolio, I now have authored eight (8) books (authored and co-authored) and a dozen or more of researches.  But more than this, I would like to think that my contribution to higher learning is more substantial than the number of books and researches written.  Conservatively, if there are (at least) 1000 students under me in a year, and if I have been teaching for a decade, that is already 10,000 students who were fortunate enough to have me as their professor.

Ten thousand students who by and large were influenced by my teaching and by my thinking.  And by natural expansion, these students in turn influence other people and by exponential projection, you now have considerable sum of people benefitting from my teaching.  By my estimation, at least around 100,000 students.

Now that is a considerable sum by any stretch of imagination.