How activity is taking over real value in today's economy

If you take a close look at what's been happening in the economy lately, it’s pretty clear that there’s more focus on being busy rather than actually producing results. We're starting to see a shift where companies are more about performance than productivity. Before, we used to measure economic activities based on how productive they were, but now it’s all about things like Zoom calls, being constantly available, and pumping out more work instead of making actual sales. It feels like businesses are leaning way too much on analytics instead of considering how their products or services actually impact people. It seems like metrics are taking over the role of real goals. Do you think this is a sustainable approach? They’re just hitting targets that look good on paper, but the real value gets overlooked. Because of this, GDP, which is supposed to reflect economic growth, is starting to drop!

The opinion of the customers doesn't matter for companies these days, because they think to have reached a superior level of transcendence. The companies know what is good for you, they decide what you should consume and how. I can't think on a better example than movies' industry. The content released since 2010's is pure garbage. It has little connection with reality and little impact over the emotions of the audience (at least, not in the same intensity it used to have previously). Every movies produced feel artificial, if not by the aesthetics, it's by the behaviors and social interactions presented. But that is not the kind of data which is going to appear through analytics. It's a feeling many people don't even know how to manifest in words yet, as they live on automatic mode. Meanwhile, companies will continue profiting that way, imposing their distorted way of thinking.

Any company that thinks that the opinion of the customer doesn't matters, is actually digging its own grave, because that is going to be their down fall. No matter how standardised a system of company is, even if it is in higher level of operations and it doesn't consider the satisfaction of the customers, it will gradually collapses definitely. Some customers value quality rather than quantity. The more quality your product possess, the more it will attract the customers. And the customer will inform more customers, and your product will be in higher demand, but only if your product truly worth it. Products are made so that they should reach the final stage of production which is for consumption for the benefit of the producers. So what did you think will happen to the product and the company if the consumer failed to purchase them? The company will not only lose the profits they might also end up losing the capital too if care is not taken.

I think real problem is not on the metric or KPI, but how we design the metric. Unrealistic KPI will bring bad impact not only on productivity but also on personality. Get job is very hard , so anybody will do everything to keep their chair. based on my experiences as business owner, i also make KPI to avoid productivity illusion. For example KPI for slaes, I focused on actual closing or revenue, conversaqtion rate, quality of deal and quality of customer and long impact for my company, not just report of calls and sales call, so my KPI focus not just on selling but on real closing and repeat order.

Because there are WAAAY too many jobs that are actually not provided with some specific accounted task. It means, it is not a simple job where you can check and see how much they worked, someone may come in, and do nothing and leave and you would not know it for that day, it would become obvious if they did that for weeks, but we have seen online stories where people spent months that way. So all in all, I would expect that it will not be simple and we should be expecting something that will take some time for it to recover from. I think it's clear that boss's just wants to be on top of it.

Large systems have a tendency towards increasing the level of bureaucracy and creating more "bullshit jobs", which means more clerks, who don't do productive work but rather exist to keep the system in a state of "fake activity". Corporate bureaucracy is as bad as government bureaucracy. Every institution/organization, which has over 1000 employees falls into the trap of bureaucratic self-sufficiency. Maybe AI will soon put an end to all the "bullshit jobs" and all the "office plankton" employees. This means higher efficiency but less jobs on the labor market.

We do seem to be in a very bubbly environment, which you can see because there are bigger swings on short term announcements that Trump loves to do. He can and has been causing the market to sway 5-10% multiple times which is "correction" territory, but he's also leading the whole world down a path which is more likely to end in a recession. It's kinda boring wondering what new stupid shit the president will say tomorrow and much preferred the "sleepy" style that people liked to berate the last president for. The stupid thing is America was well on its path to recovery after COVID and Russia's war on Ukraine, everything was finally stabilizing again - he could have looked like a genius just by doing nothing, yet his innate talent for extreme stupidity managed to overrule that

For me I see it as a warning that company has mistake motion for progress and the system do reward visibility and numbers instead of real value. This can make people look active while the main value that customers are to feel is reducing,this is a sign that companies or an organisation should or needs to redirect on impact and not just indicators. People feels that there's busy but being busy don't actually mean productive