Led by Frederick Winslow Taylor Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Frederick Winslow Taylor Simulacrum on the discipline Frederick Winslow Taylor set out in The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 — the book the Academy of Management voted the most influential management book of the twentieth century — and the question of what in it actually survives, separated from what was specific to its era and from what was wrong even at the time.
It is the historical ground of the operations strand: BUS 1600 (the Ohnoian Lean Simulacrum on the Toyota Production System) and BUS 1700 (the Demingian Quality Simulacrum on quality made upstream) both built on Taylor while correcting the third pillar — bringing the worker back into the study of the work. Reading Taylor first sharpens what each correction was actually correcting.
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Led by Frederick Winslow Taylor Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around one process you supervise. The first sub-unit separates the modern caricature of Taylor from his actual claims, walking the three pillars of scientific management — the science of the work, scientific selection and training, and the division between planning and execution — and identifying which of the three is most embedded in your own organisation. The second walks soldiering, Taylor's term for the deliberate slow-working that workers adopt when they fear that speeding up will hurt them, and asks whether the structural condition still exists in your work, often in a form Taylor would not have recognised. The third has you take one of your own processes and assess honestly whether it has been studied or merely inherited.
Outcome
You leave with one of your own processes classified honestly as studied or inherited, the soldiering condition in your organisation diagnosed, and one concrete step named that would move the process from inherited to studied — including the falsifiable question the study would answer and the conditions under which workers would participate honestly rather than defensively.
Sub-units