The 24-Hour Business: Maximizing Productivity Through Round-the-Clock Operations.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Bookshelf

The 24-Hour Business: Maximizing Productivity Through Round-the-Clock Operations. By Richard Coleman. Amacom, 195 pages. 27.95.

The title may seem to imply that the book is urging companies to setup 24-hour operations, but it is more about guiding companies that already have a lot of shift work about how they can get the most from their workforces.

Richard Coleman, a consultant who heads a firm based in California and Australia, sees a need for 24-hour operations "growing in many hospitals, communications, transportation, supermarket, retail, insurance, computer operations and other service industries... As information access expands and a global economy becomes a reality, more and more businesses will move to shift work."

While daily shift work is the book's principal focus, Coleman has also done some consulting work with the extreme version -- "fly in/fly out" arrangements in remote areas, where workers toil for weeks at a stretch. These will become more common in the coming...