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Erik Brynjolfsson is the Director of the Center for eBusiness at MIT, the George and Sandi Schussel Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School and Director or Advisor of several technology-intensive firms. Professor Brynjolfsson was among the first researchers to measure the productivity contributions of information technologies, and his research has been recognized with six "Best Paper" awards by fellow academics. He lectures worldwide on business strategy, pricing models and intangible assets, including keynote addresses at the Business Week CEO Summit, the Business Week CIO Summit, the Economist eBusiness Summit, and the eBusiness Expo. He is Editor of the Ecommerce Research Forum, and several books including Understanding the Digital Economy (MIT Press, 2000) and Strategies for eBusiness Success (Jossey-Bass, 2001). Professor Brynjolfsson has served on the Editorial Boards of numerous academic journals as well as Time Magazine's Board of Economists. Interview conducted 13 October 2004
Kenneth McGee: Reasonable goals for today would be to help clients get a better understanding of IT's role in promoting productivity growth and of associated factors and practices, as well as determine what's next. What's the next contribution for IT in pursuit of productivity growth? Where will it come from? When will it happen? Why will it happen in the first place? What are you seeing on the radar screen? You told me a couple of times that you've consulted with Alan Greenspan on numerous occasions. Can you help us understand why the chairman is interested so much in IT and IT's role in productivity? Erik Brynjolfsson: Well, his interest goes back to the 1990s when we started seeing this enormous productivity uptick. For a couple decades before then - from 1973 to 1995 or so - productivity growth in the United States was stuck at about 1% per year. And when I started doing my dissertation research and worked with some of the other people here at MIT — Bob Solow and others — the consensus was that, that's where productivity is: about 1% year. It's probably always going to be that way. And it was puzzling because IT wasn't adding much to it. So, Bob Solo made his famous comment, "We see the computer age everywhere except the productivity statistics." But then, in 1995, productivity roughly doubled, to about 2.5% per year. And many people thought it was just a temporary business cycle aberration because the economy was overheating and growing rapidly — and productivity tends to be cyclical. In other words, productivity tends to be higher at the top of the business cycle and lower during recessions. But, Alan Greenspan, to his credit, saw that there was something deeper going on. He is a very good economist, and he also has a great deal of business experience. So he brings together those different perspectives. He'd been talking to business leaders, just as I had been, and saw that maybe something was changing in the economy. And he came across some of my writing on this and found it was a good way to explain how information technology was leading these business changes.
And this was around what time frame? Brynjolfsson: About 1997. I believe he quoted one of my papers in his Congressional testimony in 1999 or 2000. McGee: Well, he has certainly brought up the notion of IT's role many times. Can you briefly discuss what the role is in the economy between IT and productivity? Brynjolfsson: Sure. Productivity growth comes from new technologies and new ways of doing things - new techniques of production. By definition, it doesn't come from working harder or more hours. For that matter, if you measure productivity as multi-factor productivity, the way it usually is, then you put capital in denominators. So, simply putting more capital into your production function doesn't help productivity, either. It comes from something going above and beyond that. And information technology has added to productivity in several ways. One is just through the technology itself — allowing you to do things faster or more efficiently. But the second, more interesting way has been by changing the way work gets done, allowing new techniques of production to be created and invented, things like Wal-Mart's supply chain revolution and similar revolutions in most other industries, for that matter — airlines, banks, pharmaceuticals — that have fundamentally changed these industries — manufacturing, transportation and retailing. The other category much attention has been paid to is the smaller micro-inventions, the complementary inventions that thousands or millions of information workers and blue-collar workers make when they are given new tools. There may not be any grand design behind it, but somebody finds that they can do their scheduling more efficiently. A few years ago, my wife started using a Palm Pilot and found that she could keep track of her patients efficiently and then beam what tests had been done to them to her colleagues. She wrote a little application on her own; it wasn't some central IS project. There are millions of those kinds of innovations — people using spreadsheets or simple technologies more efficiently — that, collectively, have added up to a tremendous amount of productivity improvement. We're reaping a lot of the benefits from that in much higher levels of productivity growth than we had before. In fact, since 2000, productivity growth has almost doubled again, to about 4 percent. And this is in spite of the fact that we had a recession during that period, when productivity usually goes down. McGee: What are we seeing, though, as overt consequences of that productivity growth? At the end of the day, why do businesspeople care about that? What does Greenspan care about it? Brynjolfsson: Economists keep track of many different kinds of statistics. I think it's safe to say that productivity is the most important economic statistic. Productivity — the amount of output per worker — is ultimately what determines all of our living standards. It's what determines the wealth of nations. It's what determines the competitive advantage of companies. In the short run, you can move around your balances in different ways. But ultimately, the only way you can really succeed is by creating more value for a given amount of inputs, or using fewer inputs to create the amount of value.
What's the relationship between productivity and keeping inflation at bay? Brynjolfsson: The higher the productivity growth is, the more output you can produce for a given amount, and, therefore, you can lower your prices. And so productivity has been the major reason that we've had less inflation recently. In fact, profits have been quite high despite the fact that prices have been going down. The reason is that costs have been going down, or not rising as fast. And that's because of productivity. McGee: As well as wages. What is the impact on wages? Brynjolfsson: Impact on wages is more complex. Ultimately, productivity should be good for wages. But it's not automatic, and it's certainly not immediate. Productivity makes the pie bigger. How you divide up that pie is a function of bargaining power. And in the past few years, stockholders, who are the recipients of profits of the firm, have gotten more of the gains than employees have. And so wages have not grown particularly rapidly. It's been a little out of sync with historical norms. Most economists expect that that to go back. But other forces tend to drive down or increase competition with workers, as well as drive down wage growth, such as globalization, off-shoring and substitution of technology for labor in many industries and job categories. McGee: Pertaining to labor though, there's an ever-diminishing ratio of workers to retirees as the population grows older. Do you see productivity-oriented IT projects taking on a more important — almost higher-priority — kind of stature? Or is there still a gap between businesses understanding that relationship and acting on it? Brynjolfsson: It's true that the ratio of workers to retirees is going down. And that makes productivity growth especially valuable. But it would be valuable in any scenario. The question is, "What do you do with productivity growth?" Often, there's a perception that there's a fixed amount of output to be produced. And if you have more productivity, you use less labor — a zero-sum game. But it's possible and desirable to increase the amount of output you're producing with whatever labor portion has. So, even if we had more workers, productivity would still be a good thing. But, if we want to maintain the standards of living of our retirees and our present workers, then we need to have more productivity growth if we're not going to have more labor. McGee: From 1975 to 1995 — and even since 1995 — has there been a relationship between productivity gains and people losing jobs? Brynjolfsson: Yes, there has been. For any given level of output, the more productivity growth, the less labor is required. Now, if output had grown faster, we'd be able to have the best of both worlds. We'd be able to have everyone working and also have even more output produced — disproportionately more. So, there are certainly specific cases where companies haven't needed as many workers. And technology has allowed them to do that. But the real culprit is the lack of output. And output growth could be even higher. And then we would be able to have a growing labor force, even with productivity growth. Certainly, to be clear, slowing down productivity growth would be no solution to preventing people from losing their jobs. McGee: Do you see future productivity gains resulting in further job loss? Is that just an inevitable relationship? Brynjolfsson: No. It's a function of how the economy grows. If we have policies that lead to a growth in economy, then I don't see any reason for further job loss. We've had enormous productivity growth within the past century. At the same time, we have a very high share of the working-age population in the labor force. There's no reason that can't continue. We haven't reached a point where computers are such good substitutes that there isn't anything left for people to do. There are plenty of jobs that people are better than computers at. So, we can have both. McGee: It's pretty clear that economists care a lot about productivity and IT's role in it. At the end of the day, must IT professionals care about productivity in their delivery of day-to-day services? Brynjolfsson: Yes. Productivity is a key metric that CIOs and CEOs — and really, every businessperson — should keep track of at many different levels: the task level, the group level, the firm level. I keep track of it at the economy and global level, as well. Productivity producing more output is ultimately what drives competitive success of a company. And if you can find a way to make your company more productive, then it's going to be more profitable because market value is going to go up. It's going to win market share. It's going to have more satisfied customers. It's going to have lower cost.
Are you finding companies that are tracking productivity gains? Brynjolfsson: Yes, very much so. McGee: What are some good examples? Brynjolfsson: One of the companies that do it and test it well is Cisco. I just came back from the West Coast. I've long been impressed with how carefully they track productivity metrics and tie them to their use of technology. They're very quantitative. GE does this a lot through its TQM-type initiatives. Doug Busch, the CIO of Intel, is a real fan — maybe even fanatic — of productivity management and understanding how IT, in particular, affects productivity. McGee: These are not economists? Brynjolfsson: No. But they see the business needs for it. Part of what I like to do is tie together some of the task-level and firm-level data with the economy-wide level. Historically, there's been a bit of a gap at that. Alan Greenspan and others have to look at what the whole economy is doing. And some of the businesses I just mentioned do it more at the firm level. I see a real linkage between those two levels. McGee: Let's talk about that research then and the practices in successful organizations. Not too long ago, you published that research and the findings on more than 1,000 companies. Brynjolfsson: Yes. I guess more than a thousand companies. It depends on the sub-sample. McGee: And your experiences with productivity improvements. Can you briefly go through what your major research findings were from that study? Brynjolfsson: Well, the first thing we do is we tried to see whether there's a basic correlation between productivity and information technology. And so, we just tracked the productivity of all these firms and their IT investments and particularly the IT capital they had in place. And we found that there was a loose correlation. It was highly statistically significant. But I say a loose correlation because we found a lot of examples of firms that were very aggressive IT investors that had poor productivity as well as those that had high productivity. We found firms in all four quadrants of IT versus productivity, which is, of course, what the case data say, as well. I mean, anybody who studied this can quickly come up with half a dozen tremendous success stories and half a dozen utter disasters. And we found those in our data set. But, I like to quote George Steigler (1982 Nobel prize winner for Economics) who said the plural of anecdote is data. And when you put enough of these together, that the anecdotes kind of average out and you see behind it an overall trend where, on average, more IT-intensive firms were more productive. But we were actually more interested not so much in the overall correlation, but what differentiated those firms that were above the regression line that were more productive than their peers from those that were below the line that, despite spending a lot on IT weren't so productive. And from a whole bunch of interviews we did with people in different companies — some in our sample, some outside of our sample — we started noticing a pattern of practices that emerged again and again. And since MIT is a quantitative place, and that's the kind of work I did, I decided I wanted to make this as rigorous as possible. So, we put it into a 20-minute interview guide. And we went back and interviewed the firms that we had previously gotten productivity and IT data from. We interviewed not the IT managers, but the human resource managers because what we were hearing was that the work practices really made a big difference. So that's what we were seeing. We wanted to see if these work practices that we observed in a few of the real successful companies were replicated again and again in our sample. And it turns out that's exactly what we found. There was a set of work practices that we now call the digital organization, which were highly correlated with the use of information technology. That is to say that these firms — the firms that were more IT-intensive -tended to adopt these work practices McGee: And you kept seeing this among the successful companies? Brynjolfsson: We saw it — well, we saw the work practices were more common in IT users in general, regardless of whether they were successful. But, specifically, the work practices could explain why some firms were above the regression line versus below. So, if you were using these work practices, you were much more likely to be in the successful — in the high-IT and high-productivity — quadrant, whereas if you weren't using the work practices, you were more likely to be in the high-IT, low-productivity quadrant. McGee: But when you saw the high-IT and high-productivity quadrant, you saw a common set of practices. Brynjolfsson: Yes. Let me give you three results. One was that IT was correlated with the use of these work practices. Another was that IT work practices were correlated with higher performance. So, it's correlated separately with each of those things. The third finding was that performance was disproportionately high in firms that had the work practices and the technology. So, combining technology with the work practices gave you a disproportionate boost. McGee: A boost in productivity? Brynjolfsson: Exactly. McGee: Could the productivity boost have been gained without IT? Brynjolfsson: The simplest answer to that would be no, because we found that there were firms that had spent a lot on IT and had not invested in the work practices. And, on average, those firms had relatively poor performance. It's a large sample. So, you could find examples of successful firms that did just about anything, and unsuccessful firms that do just about anything because they got lucky and did it all well or they got a patent. So, you have a lot of noise. But, if you look at the general pattern, heavy IT spenders that didn't adopt the work practices saw no benefit from their IT investments. McGee: You mentioned a digital organization. What is it? And what are some of those practices? Brynjolfsson: Digital organizations were the firms that answered these interviews. And we saw a pattern that emerged. The first practice we saw was an obvious one. In fact, when we first did it, we didn't even list it, but now we break it out explicitly, which was that they converted a lot of analog work practices to digital work practices. They moved from paper-based systems to electronic systems. I mentioned Cisco earlier. There's very little paper in that organization. Brad Boston, the CIO, says he's signed only three pieces of paper in the past year; everything is done electronically. A lot of other firms have done that. And that speeds up the organization's metabolism quite a bit. That's to be expected when you go digital. A lot of firms just sort of stopped there and said, "OK, now we've gone digital." But the other six practices really had much more to do with the human-resource side of things. One was the distributing of decision rights throughout the organization more broadly. Interestingly, in some ways this seems to contradict the first one, because going digital often entails a lot of centralizing of decision-making and rule-based systems and Oracle databases. If you look more closely, you see there are certain kinds of decisions — quantitative, rule-based decisions — that can be centralized through a computer-based system. At the same time, decisions that involve human interaction, judgment, exception processing and creativity tend to get pushed out into organizations — out to the people in the field or out to the factory floor, for that matter. So, different types of decisions go in opposite directions. On average, for the main decisions we asked about, they tend to be distributed to line workers rather than to the center and top of the organization. A third practice we found that goes with the decision rights is strong performance-based incentives. And that helps support distributed decision rights. If you're going to give people the authority to make decisions, you have to make sure they're making them in the interest of the organization. Another practice is a policy of much more open information access and communication. So, we found that these organizations had more lateral as well as more vertical sharing of information. Every dimension we looked at had more sharing of information through e-mail messages, intranets, etc. Again, you can see how this supports distributed decision making. If you're going to give people the authority to make decisions, you need to also have them have the information available to make those decisions. We also found that these firms were much more focused in their business lines. They tended to prune out non-profitable lines and invest heavily and explicitly in corporate culture. At Cisco, they have a director of corporate culture. Again, I see this as a necessary complement to having people have more information and authority. You have to do what you can to keep them on the same page. Performance-linked incentives help with that. But there are some things you can't incentivize and quantify. So, another way to keep people on the same page is through having a corporate culture and a relatively good focus in terms of what your goals are for the organization.
We asked about various standardized tests and what sort of thresholds they had. These companies tended to have higher thresholds in analytical ability, verbal skills, teamwork and people skills. In all of those dimensions, they put the thresholds higher. They tended to hire more educated workers, people with more experience. And then the seventh practice had to do with what they did once those employees got there. These firms invested more money in training once they got there to further increase their human capital — more days per year training and more use of Internet-based training systems. So, when you put it all together, they tended to put more effort into having really good people, giving them authority to make decisions and giving them information to make the decisions — incentive systems that support that, a culture that supports that. And it all seems to fit together with the pattern of a high metabolism — a high information metabolism organization that keeps track of what its customers, suppliers and environment are doing. And it responds to that using information technology. McGee: On March 10, you wrote a piece that talked about productivity's technology iceberg. You said that the most successful digital organizations foster a fundamentally new organizational culture to break down silos that isolate technologists from managers. In the research, who are the people who break those silos? Brynjolfsson: Well, it falls on — not surprisingly — a number of people on different sides of those silos. You can't believe it took just to one side or the other. I talked with a lot of IT folks. And more and more of them are realizing the importance of having a close connection with business unit heads and, as much as possible, trying to get some of the technology initiatives driven by business unit directors. I've also been talking to a lot of business unit heads and CEOs. In many of these companies — maybe even most of them — there's a much higher appreciation for technology, not just as a utility, but as a driver for changing the way the company runs. McGee: That's what I'm getting at. I'm trying to identify what the role of IT professionals has been in this set of research findings. Have you found IT professionals to be at the forefront of bringing about these changes? Are they secondary to non-IT professionals, as you mentioned, IT-savvy executives? Brynjolfsson: It varies. We have the MIT CIO Summit that we hold each year, so I hear from a lot of them. Many of the people who come to that are in the forefront. But to be frank, at a lot of companies, the IT executives usually are at the forefront. It tends to be driven more from the CEOs, but sometimes CFOs and other business unit heads are at the forefront. In the past few years, many CIOs have been much more focused on cost cutting and just getting what they already have working properly. And there's been a little bit less focus on pushing the frontier. Paradoxically, some of the CFOs and CEOs I've talked to almost have a greater appreciation for what IT could do. I was talking to the CFO of Citigroup, who said that he saw IT as an area where you could make bigger investments over time because of productivity improvements. And that allowed him to take cost out of other parts of the organization and put them onto a Moore's Law-type curve, where you could generate some savings. McGee: You identified in that same piece that, to be successful, businesses need what is still far too rare — managers knowledgeable about both technology and business. And you also talked about innovations changing the way work is done. Now, again, what role do IT professionals play in that? Which comes first in this chicken-and-the-egg scenario? Do the IT professionals say, "Hey, IT can now help this occupational role change"? Or is it the non-IT people from the business units who say we need to do something far more effectively? Again, who leads? Who follows? Brynjolfsson: It has to be a partnership. I often find it's the non-IT executives who are leading some of these initiatives. But that's partly because a lot of IT executives haven't historically had some of the business skills or maybe interests. And it's still rarer than it should be. In principle, though, IT executives could be taking a much more active role in leading this business process change. If we get people who simultaneously have those technology and business skills, then you can transform the business. McGee: What would be some specific steps they could take to accomplish that? Brynjolfsson: They need to start thinking about how the technology can fundamentally change what the business is doing — not simply do what they're already doing at a lower cost or more efficiently. McGee: Does that suggest that they have to become expert in the business processes? Brynjolfsson: Actually, yes. They do have to have a deep knowledge of the business processes, customers and suppliers. It's hard for any one person to be able to do that. And they have to understand what the technology can do to allow them to, for example, hook up with their customers in new ways. More and more CIOs are taking the time to try to understand some of the ways that technology can be used so they can share that with their CEOs and other senior members of the management team. McGee: With regard to the next phases of IT's contribution to productivity, do you see a next great frontier in terms of, first, industries, and then, second, occupational roles? Let me give you an example. The Bureau of Labor Statistics places the number-one category of occupational activity as office and administrative, with almost 23 million people. This is followed by salespeople (13 million people) and management (six million people). Are these, or any other categories that you can think of, among the next targets for productivity gain and, frankly, people losing their jobs? Brynjolfsson: I do see a real continuing and growing opportunity for IT to improve transactions between firms and their customers and their suppliers and business partners. The Internet started a new wave of this. But we're still at the early stages of interorganizational systems and customer self-service systems, where customers — whether they're business-to-business or business-to-consumer — are able to take care of a lot of their own needs much more efficiently, without the involvement of physical retail establishments or human salespeople. There are many companies where customers service themselves - travel and ordering things like routers from Cisco — and are able to do a better job. ATMs, I guess, are the oldest example. In many cases, with higher levels of customer satisfaction, we have great potential to continue to be able to do that and speed up the feedback cycle with that information. Dell is a prototypical example of a firm that's done that very effectively. McGee: Do you see occupations that are likely targets for productivity gains to effectively to remove them? Brynjolfsson: Yes. There are numerous types of salespeople who are really adding value in terms of understanding and educating customers with new news. But others are simply conveying information that could be provided as easily, or filling out forms. In most occupations, the end result will not be that the entire job goes away, but aspects of it will. And the people involved will become less focused on the aspects of the job that are rote, routine and automatable and more focused on the human, emotional and creative aspects of things, which computers are not very well-suited to handle. McGee: What are some of the skills that are needed for an IT professional to get into this realm of being the leader in moving a company toward great productivity? Brynjolfsson: Well, in my research, nine-tenths of the cost and nine-tenths of the benefit of big IT projects are not in computer hardware or even software. They're in the organizational and human capital changes. And so, if you want to have a big impact, you need to be able to understand those organizational and human capital aspects of the business process change. Those are the ones that tend to be the roadblocks to success or the ones that allow you to do things differently. So, that means understanding business process management and design. It means understanding and having the people skills to project lead and manage change at a corporate-wide or even value chain level, where multiple suppliers and partners are tied in. And it means understanding how this is going to deliver bottom-line productivity benefits to the organization as a whole, not just in the IT organization. Historically, too many CIOs have thought of productivity just as how they can deliver more gigabytes of disk storage or megabits of communications capacity. Those aren't the productivity measures that really matter to the organization; it's how satisfied your customers are, how you're saving cost on the supplier side, and have allowed for more creativity and added value at all levels of the organization. McGee: That suggests retooling by these IT professionals. Is that what we're saying? Brynjolfsson: Yes. McGee: So, where is the future of IT and productivity? Where do you see it heading? What's its next chapter? Brynjolfsson: I'm pretty optimistic in the medium and long run. I don't see that IT has matured in the sense that it's leveled off in terms of its growth pattern. McGee: Growth path for? Brynjolfsson: For basic technology and, ultimately, productivity. I know there's talk that IT's reached the stage where it's mature, like electricity to the railroads. But that doesn't show up at all in the underlying data. Individual sub-technology and individual types of technology certainly are maturing. But there's wave after wave of new technologies coming along in wireless communications and RFID, in chip storage, and in applications. So, even as one area matures, there are new ones that are in the very early stages and others that are in the rapid growth stages. McGee: Do you have any little jewels that you'd like to share about what functions would be made possible by IT through this augmentation notion — functions that have never been done before, rather than just automation of things? Brynjolfsson: Yes. I see a lot of ideas from students, and others come by me from the Media Lab and other ways. Some that look especially intriguing are the interactive voice response systems that finally are getting to the point that they're genuinely usable. A lot of your readers probably have used, say, the United Airlines reservation system, for instance. It's one of the few that I've found that works pretty well. More and more other types of phone systems within a reasonably well-prescribed domain are able to solve people's problems in real-time, without using offshore labor or without using any labor at all, but using some intelligent algorithms. And those are getting to the point of getting more and more powerful, and it's one of the ways that more customer self-service. Improved customer interactions will be a growing trend in the coming years. McGee: A final question. You're there at the table next to Chairman Greenspan, giving testimony, and a question comes to you: "So, therefore, professor, where does the future of IT and its role with productivity lie in the next five to 10 years?" I want a reaction shot. Brynjolfsson: OK. I'm optimistic in the medium to long term. But in the short run, we may see a bit of a hiccup. The reason I'm concerned is that our research has traced the productivity gains in the early part of this decade back to investments that were made in the late 1990s, because of the organizational change lags involved. Well, in the early part of this decade — 2001 and 2002 — IT investments fell. And there wasn't the same kind of focus on developing new types of applications. Instead, it was much more on harvesting what was already invested in. That was good for short-term productivity in 2001, 2002 and 2003. But it ate some of the seed corn that would lead to the next wave of productivity in 2005 and 2006. So, that is likely to dampen a little bit the performance relative to what we would have seen if the earlier trends had continued. Ultimately, I'm optimistic about productivity growth being the higher end of most estimates. But it's not necessarily going to be a smooth and steady path. McGee: But for that to occur, it does suggest creative businesspeople thinking in new ways. Brynjolfsson: Well, that's exactly it. McGee: How do we foster that? Frankly speaking, are people just tripping over that? Are they finding it by accident? Or are they doing it with intent? Brynjolfsson: No. There's a lot of intent. People come to me, but that's not a random sample, I suppose. But you see it most explicitly in other countries. When I go to Europe, they ask how they can foster this. And they see America, rightly so, as being a leader in combining the use of technology with business process change and with a lot of creative and entrepreneurism. McGee: The productivity gains have been less in Europe. Is it that cultural aspect that retards its ability to advance as America has in its reluctance to participate in the cultural change? Brynjolfsson: It's a vicious circle because what happens is their labor markets tends to be less flexible. They don't have as much of an entrepreneurial culture in many ways. And that makes it less profitable to make some of these IT investments because you're not going to be able to shift people around as easily, which, in turn, leads to less incentive for investing in this kind of culture. Many companies and industries in the United States have gotten on a virtuous circle where the technology reads more productivity, which enables more organizational change, which has led to more flexible — even chaotic — changes in industries. But that, in turn, further heightens the payoff for technology investments. So, the United States has higher levels of overall IT investment, but also higher returns because of the fact that it has a culture and organizational environment that has nicely complemented the technology. Other countries are trying to learn from that and keep up. And many companies in the United States are quite focused on understanding how they can further foster that kind of a culture. McGee: So, what's the next major work we can expect from you? Brynjolfsson: I'm focusing more and more on taking some of those statements about culture and organizational structure — this nine-tenths of the iceberg that we've identified in our research — and being more explicit about what exactly the practices are that are similar or different in these organizations, along the lines of the seven practices I outlined earlier. I don't think that's the end of the list. We're seeing that different industries have different emphasis or even somewhat different lists from each other. McGee: I look forward to seeing that output. Thank you very, very much.  |
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