Taylorism at work: Thoughts on doctrinal affairs

"In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first, " said Mr. Taylor, the inventor of the "management consultant". 

His statement suggests that the system is more important than the humans, isn't it? 

Frederick Winslow Taylor is the god of the faithful followers of the sect created by Motorola’s Six-Sigma of the 1980s - yes, the one that copied the color belt rankings of the martial arts but mistakenly left the punches out. In a few words: just another top-down data-driven loop. 

But back to Taylor. Some credit him as the inventor of the infamous "open office" in 1904. 

You know the drill: all the workers together in a wide-open floor and the bosses in private offices on the second level. In the modern versions, some managers "working hard" buying stuff in Amazon or reserving their next vacation paid by annual bonuses. Good that many businesses are jumping out of the open office trend.

I’ve seen a good dose of Taylorism in my career. All good in the meetings. Plenty of exuberant presentations flooded with data. So much that you can drown in it. 

But the views from the bottom quarters show a different picture. Taylor’s obsession with data and his mechanical views opened the door to opportunism through data manipulation and deception. Statistics became the thing that matter. The workers were just parts of the machine. 

Lenin and the soviets loved Taylor's ideas and implemented them in all the Socialist countries of the 20th century - still some survive. But it didn't work well. 

Why? 

Leaving aside the concepts of Ludwig von Mises, they had problems with data manipulation. Their central economic planning only worked on paper. The Communist leaders were lied and lied again with false production data. 

But Taylor's stuff is great for a few in our western world. Be it through consulting or teachings and certifications of doctrinal variations of Taylorism, it can bring money to your pocket. 

The corporate work is flooded with BS and deception. Are you still playing "the system"?

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