My dad sent me this fascinating WSJ piece about Gavriel Salvendy, China’s New Guru of Productivity.  Productivity is a funny thing in China, a country that sometimes seems to value face time in the office (during which many employees can be seen watching Youku videos or napping at their desks) over actual output.

The story of China’s productivity revolution starts with the improbable tale of Gavriel Salvendy, a Hungarian-Israeli-American high-school drop-out. Growing up in a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation, Mr. Salvendy hid in haystacks to escape deportation. Later, after his family abandoned Europe, he became the Israeli weight-lifting champion. Now 72, at well over 6 feet tall and 265 pounds, he still has the presence of a strongman.

For the past nine years, Mr. Salvendy has run the department of industrial engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China’s equivalent of MIT. He is an incongruous presence there—a booming maverick in a hierarchical and generally conformist culture—but he and his team of professors have helped to boost productivity at some Chinese factories by as much as 20% a year.

Professor Gavriel Salvendy lectures to PHd students in Tsinghua University in Beijing. Chien-min Chung/Getty Images for the Wall Street Journal

Tsinghua is the best-known, most prominent university in China, the place where all students dream to go.

This part of the story is incredible:

Tsinghua asked Mr. Salvendy to head its new department of industrial engineering, an invitation that was a minor revolution. No other foreigner headed a Tsinghua department. To show how serious it was about getting China on the road to higher productivity, the university tore up its salary scale, offering Mr. Salvendy fully 20 times the standard pay package for a Chinese professor.

And along with that pay package, Mr. Salvendy also attracted the attention of colleagues in other departments:

The country’s leadership was eager to encourage its over-pressured, conformist students to think more imaginatively, anticipating the day when China’s catch-up growth would come to an end. Mr. Salvendy’s discussion-based teaching methods seemed designed to foster lateral thinking. The ministry let it be known that if Tsinghua could demonstrate results, its approach would be adopted at other universities.

When I was teaching at Jiaxing University, I experimented with discussion-based teaching methods, sometimes with hilarious results. The second week I played a song, and asked my students, “What do you think of the song?”  Silence. Eventually I put the smartest student on the spot. “Excuse me, teacher,” he responded. “We want to know what you think first.”  I then explained that they could describe the song as nice, romantic, slow, boring, etc.  And then, after more prodding, he and his classmates answered my question.

In a factory setting, I can imagine a similar situation.  (I have no experience in factories and I am totally going out on a limb. If you know more, please let me know what you think! ) The workers might be thinking, “I sew this side seam.  This is my job.  This is what I do.”  The question of “How to do this better?” is both outside the scope of this person’s job, and not immediately helpful.

Thus, the question of “How to do this better?” is a question for managers.  Mr. Salvendy did just this:

At Hua Jian, most workers arrived fresh from the countryside and then quit after a year or so; the level of training was both low and uneven. Because skills were minimal, the tasks had to be split up more, so that each worker was required to master a single simple function. But because skills were uneven, workers at some stations might complete their task in 30 seconds while others took a full minute. The least productive workers would determine the speed of the conveyor belt, while the most productive ones would spend half the shift idle.

This past summer, the Tsinghua team devised a way to balance out the tasks on the production lines to minimize wastage. Hua Jian’s productivity registered a further 20% gain.

If he has anywhere near the power ascribed to him in this Wall Street Journal article, Mr. Gavriel Salvendy will change China, in a way that few foreigners can.