Re: System versus Individual

["John K. Balor" <balor1999@yahoo.com>]

Bob sees the main difference between that of Deming and Taylor being Deming's focus on system and variation.  I don't understand.  On one of the first pages of "The principles of scientific management" Taylor says something like "before man was in the centre, in the future the system will be at the centre".
   
  if there ever was a management thinker who focused on systems thinking, then certainly Taylor was.  In fact, most of Deming's writing on management seems to be footnotes to Taylor.  His view that management is responsible for 80%, 90%, 94%, 97% or perhaps 100% of the problems seems totally consistent with Taylor from my point of view.  It is the basic Tayloristic idea of the seperation between management and workers, fundamental to all the four laws of scientific management.
   
  However, when Deming speaks of Systems, he refers to systems thinkers like Churman, Ackoff and the operations research movement.  Of course, systems thinking evolved from the time of Taylor and reach a more advanced stage in the forties and fifties which seems to be the basis for Deming's systems thinking.  Nevertheless, I can see no conflict with Taylor here.  In fact, the Gant diagrams and various tools that Taylor and friends developed and used are clearly templates for PERT analysis and other methods used in OR.
   
  I think it is also unreasonable to point at the significance of understanding variation.  Taylor produced his body of work before the works of Fisher, Neyman, Shewhart etc.  He did not have the tools for visualizing variation in a good way, but it is quite clear from the reading of "principles of scientific management" that he was clearly focused on the importance of variation.  For instance, when he talks about the girls checking bicycle balls, one of the main ideas he tries to explain is the need for breaks and variation.
   
  Deming talks of the malfunction of "traditional" management, but so did Taylor.  If Deming had anything critical at all to say on Taylor, I would very much like to read it, because in my understanding Deming was one of the greatest Taylorists of all time.
   
  John Balor.
  
[Moderator's Note: You might want to get a copy of _Deming's Profound Changes - When will the 
Sleeping Giant Awaken?_ by Delavigne & Robertson, ISBN 0-13-292690-3 for a look at Taylor and Deming
in the same context. ]