Scientific Management
It takes fortitude and perseverance, as well as imagination, to solve big problems. These qualities are most abundant when a problem is not only important but also inspiring. Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the important management innovators of the twentieth century, and also a pioneer, is usually portrayed as an engineer, intent on mechanizing work and pushing employees to work at the maximum speed humanly possible and healthy. But Taylor’s single-minded devotion to efficiency stemmed from his conviction that it was iniquitous to waste an hour of human labor when a task could be redesigned to be performed in less time with less effort.
This passion for multiplying the impact of human endeavor shines through in Taylor’s introduction to his 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management: “We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.”
In Taylor's time, the contribution os human labor is much more than the contribution of machines to output of the societies. Hence Taylor said, the waste of material things is less, waste of human effort and time is more.
To maximize the chances of a management breakthrough, you need to start with a problem that is both consequential and soul stirring.
Here are three leading questions that will stimulate your imagination to find important problems.
First, what are the tough trade-offs that your company never seems to get right? Management innovation is often driven by the desire to transcend such trade-offs, which can appear to be irreconcilable. Open source development, for example, encompasses two antithetical ideas: radical decentralization and disciplined, large-scale project management.
Perhaps you feel that the obsessive pursuit of short-term earnings undermines your company’s willingness to invest in new ideas. Maybe you believe that your organization has become less and less agile as it has pursued the advantages of size and scale. Your challenge is to find an opportunity to turn an “either/or” into an “and.”
Second, what are big organizations bad at? This question should produce a long list of incompetencies. Big companies aren’t very good at changing before they have to or responding to nimble upstarts. Most fail miserably when it comes to unleashing the imagination of first-line employees, creating an inspiring work environment, or ensuring that the blanket of bureaucracy doesn’t smother the flames of innovation. Push yourself to imagine a company can’t-do that you and your colleagues could turn into a can-do.
Third, what are the emerging challenges the future has in store for your company? Try to imagine them: An ever-accelerating pace of change. Rapidly escalating customer power. Near instant commoditization of products and services. Ultra-low-cost competitors. A new generation of consumers that is hype resistant and deeply cynical about big business. These discontinuities will demand management innovation as well as business model innovation. If you scan the horizon, you’re sure to see a tomorrow problem that your company should start tackling today.
Search for new principles.
Any problem that is pervasive, persistent, or unprecedented is unlikely to be solved with hand-me-down principles. The pursuit of human liberty required America’s founders to embrace a new principle: representational democracy. More recently, scientists eager to understand the subatomic world have been forced to abandon the certainties of Newtonian physics for the more ambiguous principles of quantum mechanics. It’s no different with management innovation: Novel problems demand novel principles.
The Why, What, and How of Management Innovation
by Gary Hamel
From the HBR Magazine (February 2006)
https://hbr.org/2006/02/the-why-what-and-how-of-management-innovation
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