DickSmythe

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• ·           Dick Smythe graduated in pure mathematics and statistics at St Andrews University and then in operations research at Birmingham University
• ·           His career started with a student scholarship at Dorman Long steelworks on Teesside where he worked shifts on blast furnaces and steel mills before graduating and then in OR helping to design new  steelplants using computer simulation models
• ·           Next he moved to London to join the OR department at BISRA, then part of British Steel, and was involved in their corporate planning and cost reduction programmes
• ·         After that he was recruited by Europe's leading consultancy of the day, PA Consulting Group, where he went on to set up and grow their Productivity Services Division into a major part of the business, becoming a PA director and sitting on their UK management consultancy board
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• ·           Whilst at PA, he led a joint study with the CBI into UK productivity and jointly presented the results on TV, radio and to the press with Director General, Sir John Banham - The Times leader commented "it is refreshing to come across something that has its feet firmly planted on the ground"
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• ·           Since PA, he has mixed productivity consultancy work with playing the property and stock markets, skippering his own boat in the Fastnet and many other ocean races  and keeping his golf handicap down to single figures
• ·           He has written this book because, as the late Peter Drucker once said, managers have always sought something which lets them “do their job with less effort, in less time, yet with greater impact”