Re: PDSA, Taylor, Shewhart and Deming

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

I'm happy that Marie-Louise Thorsen Lind agrees that Deming should have named his philosophy Scientific Management, but I disagree with her saying that Taylor was not a scientist.
   
  The only thing that distinguishes him for a scientist, I would say, was that he did not have a PhD and was not associated with a university.  In this way one could perhaps argue that he was not a scientist, but when we look at what he was doing, he explains that they started out with literature reviews, reading everything they could find in English, German and French concerning the problems they were trying to solve.  Then they designed experiments, and, if I've understood correctly, published the results in peer reviewed academic journals.
   
  The genius of Taylor, I would say, was that he invented "action research" fifty years ahead of Kurt Lewin.  As somebody said, Frederick Taylor was the Isaac Newton of management.  The greatest management genius ever lived, as I think Drucker also pointed out somewhere.  And, as Gary Hamel said, everything written in management literature since 1911 is only footnotes to Taylor.  If we disregard Shewhart's invention of the SPC diagram in 1924 and Elton Mayo's experiences with the Hawthorn effect in the 1930's, I don't think there has happened anything significant in management theory since Taylor.  Everything "new" is just somebody reinventing the wheel by putting new words on something already described and investigated by Taylor.
   
  John Balor