"Can we have too much productivity improvement?" At first glance, of course not; the goodness of productivity improvement is a given in U.S. manufacturing culture. We are driven by the "obvious" need to continuously improve productivity. But questions with "obvious answers" generally deserve a second look, if only because that which is "self-evident" sometimes isn't.
The question was posed by James L. Haskett, Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard University's Graduate School of Business, in his July 2003 column, What Do YOU Think? Productivity improvement is like safety, he said, in that we tend to think we can't have too much of it.