A slightly long winded way of addressing this dead-horse of an issue, so that even clueless managers and leaderless dimwits can understand why this idiotic conc

A slightly long winded way of addressing this dead-horse of an issue, so that even clueless managers and leaderless dimwits can understand why this idiotic concern keeps cropping p all the time: When you look at the history of technology, it is always removing humans out of the system that leads to higher productivity - machines taking over in agriculture, assembly line + robotics, automation in textiles etc.. About the only thing not done yet is to replace humans in programming itself - maybe it can take a similar path as it was done in language translation; use statistical techniques on huge corpus of human-written code snippets (tagged via domain areas), and spit out solutions even if it is only approximate upto a certain confidence interval. The remaining details can be filled in by humans (and you may not need many of them). Of couse IDEs' do this somewhat with auto-code generation at a very minimalist sense right now. Maybe it needs to be combined with self-correcting programs that evolves and adapts to new conditions. Yeah all vague but we may be moving in this direction - hardware itself is getting more 'soft', so the graying of the boundaries between h/w and s/w is possibly another direction we are heading towards, and may converge with the AI driven model. Till that happens, it is the managements job to motivate humans as it is done for ages - with carrots and sticks. As you see with apes, sometimes we all have to groom each other, eat the lice, kiss here and there, rub the genitals and be co-operative. You can also try to be 'inspiring' (most humans are suckers for hero-worship, and prone to worship false idols), and generally with a more intelligent bunch, it is more effective by 'leading by example'. You want your team to work hard, prove that you can be with them in the trenches, and do the same.