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Understand and use meaningful data to measure success.
Integrate and automate quality, security, and compliance into daily work.
Understand the unique values and behaviors of a successful organization.
Explore our extensive library of experience reports.
An on-demand learning experience from the people who brought you The Phoenix Project, Team Topologies, Accelerate, and more.
Learn how making work visible, value stream management, and flow metrics can affect change in your organization.
Clarify team interactions for fast flow using simple sense-making approaches and tools.
Multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and bestselling author Gene Kim hosts enterprise technology and business leaders.
In the first part of this two-part episode of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Dr. Ron Westrum, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Eastern Michigan University.
In the first episode of Season 2 of The Idealcast, Gene Kim speaks with Admiral John Richardson, who served as Chief of Naval Operations for four years.
Weekly discussion around “Deming’s Journey to Profound Knowledge” with author John Willis.
VIRTUAL — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
Venue: Fontainebleau — Helping leaders succeed and organizations thrive (formerly DevOps Enterprise Summit).
DevOps best practices, case studies, organizational change, ways of working, and the latest thinking affecting business and technology leadership.
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Could right fit help talent discover more meaning and satisfaction at work and help companies find lost productivity?
The values and philosophies that frame the processes, procedures, and practices of DevOps.
This post presents the four key metrics to measure software delivery performance.
October 23, 2012
In 1911 Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote “The Principles of Scientific Management.” Taylor’s ideas formed the basis for the 20th century command and control management archetype. His principles and scientific methods for worker efficiency and standardization set the foundation for American steel and automobile manufacturers tremendous prosperity in the early 20th century. Henry Ford adopted many of Taylor’s ideas, picking up where Taylor left off, so much so that many consider his assembly line an extension of Taylor’s initial study. By 1927, Ford achieved reductions in manufacturing cycle times from 750 to 93 minutes while simultaneously reducing the cost of automobiles from $850 to $300.
Taylor created an efficiency movement that became an American craze. From typists to surgeons, even housewives were adopting Taylor’s ideas in the early days of the 20th century. Alfred P Sloan, General Motors CEO from 1923 to 1956, ratcheted up Taylor’s principles leading GM to become the largest corporation on earth. Some would argue that Taylor, Ford, and Sloan set the stage for most of America’s unprecedented growth and prosperity in the 20th century. However, some could also argue that this prosperity comes with a cost facing the modern day “knowledge worker” economy. This style of top down management has been called Taylorism, where management drives workers to maximum efficiencies and upper management provides decisions with little or no input from individual workers or collectively. Taylorism is embedded in our modern culture. Critics are now referring to this culture as Neo-Taylorism.
In 1986, Konosuke Matsushita the founder of Panasonic, made the following prediction about America:
“We will win, and you will lose. You cannot do anything about it because your failure is an internal disease. Your companies are based on Taylor’s principles. Worse, your heads are Taylorized, too.”
In 1993 before Clinton’s inauguration, John Sculley, the CEO at Apple at the time, accused Taylor and Ford as the heavy hands that hold American economy hostage. Though movements like Lean and DevOps provide a counter-intuitive alternative, Neo-Taylorism remains the dominant organizational model of contemporary commerce. In today’s agile, web scale, and velocity driven business environment organizations that persist in the shackles of this Neo-Tayloristic model will ironically become less and less efficient than their Lean and DevOps practicing counterparts. The Lean and DevOps style movements promote knowledge workers, bottom-up driven and non command and control management influence.
Are you working in a Neo-Taylorism style organization? Symptoms of Neo-Taylorism can be simply summarized with the following traits.
Interestingly, Taylor is considered a monster by some and an American hero by others. It is unquestionable that the prosperity most of us enjoy in the 21st century can be attributed to Taylor’s ideas. However, there are some who have gone as far as blaming the sinking of the Titanic on Taylor due to the pay-per-call efficiency reward model that was used to incentivize the ship to shore operators. The premise being that early warning messages of dangerous waters might not have been relayed due to passenger call bandwidth utilization.
I think the most important point of Taylor’s contribution is that he was the first person to truly apply scientific studies to idea of worker management and is clearly the father of what we today call “management”. Even though management scientists like Deming, Ohno and Goldratt have created counterintuitive movements their achievements may not have been possible without Taylor’s initial works.
John Willis has worked in the IT management industry for more than 35 years and is a prolific author, including "Deming's Journey to Profound Knowledge" and "The DevOps Handbook." He is researching DevOps, DevSecOps, IT risk, modern governance, and audit compliance. Previously he was an Evangelist at Docker Inc., VP of Solutions for Socketplane (sold to Docker) and Enstratius (sold to Dell), and VP of Training & Services at Opscode where he formalized the training, evangelism, and professional services functions at the firm. Willis also founded Gulf Breeze Software, an award winning IBM business partner, which specializes in deploying Tivoli technology for the enterprise. Willis has authored six IBM Redbooks for IBM on enterprise systems management and was the founder and chief architect at Chain Bridge Systems.
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