Re: Taylor's personality

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

Mark Wilcox and John Majeuris add more comments on F.W. Taylor, mostly based on how people misused Scientific Management in order to exploit workers.  This strikes me as similar to blaming Newton or Einstein for their scientific achievements as there are always people who will use the science for creating terror technology.
   
  There is one key idea that is essential for understanding Taylor's contribution to management, I feel, and that is his quest for turning management from a "rule of the thumb" disciplin into a scientific system.  Peter Drucker regarded him as the greatest management genius of all times.  Why others fail to recognize his genius is a complete mystery to me.  All the insights of Shewhart, Deming, Juran etc are only refinements of Taylor as far as I can see.  Deming talked of appreciation for a system, understanding variation, theory of knowledge and psychology.  What did Taylor say of systems, standards, knowledge and psychology?  All the ideas from the "quality movement", including Deming, is nothing more than footnotes to Taylor.  In fact, as Hamel put it, I believe, all management thinking from 1915 up to the present is only footnotes to Taylor.  Taylor was the Isaac Newton of management theory.
   
  However, as Steven Prevette and others have pointed out, there was another revolution in management theory when Shewhart introduced "random management".  I was fascinated to read John Dowd's experiments showing that flipping a coin would cause significant improvement in management processes.  Very good.  People who are not willing to be ruled by the dice don't understand Deming/Shewhart.  That's my feeling.  Few people understand the Shewhart/Deming theory, I think, just like few people understand Einstein's theory of relativity.
   
  John