The Efficiency Con

Some part of my income the past couple of decades has been driven by the demand, on the part of large corporations, to train its staff in the principles of effective staff management. It has been my good fortune in the past seven or eight years to do this for a company whose history has been built on a foundation that in key ways differs from what many professionals accept as proven management principles. To understand the difference it helps to look at the careers of two key players in building the structure of scientific managment: Frederick Winslow Taylor (Wiki) and W. Edwards Deming (Wiki).

Born in 1853, Taylor was a mechanical engineer who saw an opportunity, in the rapidly expanding industrial world, to improve efficiency by close studies of how work was actually done. He was the original "efficiency expert," armed with a stopwatch and a clipboard.  He became famous as the inventor of "scientific management." His basic approach was built on four principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

However, as indicated in a recent New Yorker article, in practice it worked rather differently. For one thing, there was a wide gap between workers and management, based largely on the understanding (or prejudice) that workers were incapable of understanding the scientific principles that would yield greater productivity. In general, this approach also exalted the role of managers. making them kind of priests in the quest for efficiency and profits. This approach reflects a militaristic attitude that was common at the turn of the 20th century: it was the job of the superior classes to command (and control) the inferior ones.

Another key aspect of Taylor's approach is that it was his business. Even though it was presented as an academic approach, he was selling scientific management to clients where the only meaningful evidence of success was a contract for his services. When confronted with deadlines and payrolls he often ended up using the same "rule of thumb" measurements he was supposed to be replacing. And there were times he didn't get paid.

Scientific management, or "Taylorism" as it was often called, has been impressively influential. It is reasonably accurate to say that the American industrial colossus was built on the principles of efficiency Taylor espoused. And it worked just fine until the American industrial model, rich in resources and markets, was challenged by an approach developed in a war-ravaged society with scarce, expensive raw materials and huge barriers to success, using an approach developed by an American whose ideas differed in fundamental ways from Taylor.

W. Edwards Deming was born in 1900.  His career was largely academic (PhD from Yale in math and physics) and then in government, specializing in statistical measurements of quality. The Second World War gave him an opportunity to test different approaches to industrial efficiency and quality control. In the immediate post-war period he worked in Japan in the occupation government to rebuild the industrial sector. The Japanese, fully aware that they needed to exploit any competitive advantage possible, worked to integrate Deming's teachings in various industries. From my point of view, the culmination of his work was his collaboration with the Toyota Motor Company in the 50s and 60s.

The key difference between Taylor's scientific management and Deming's approach, in my view, is who owns the work. As opposed to Taylor, Deming taught that every worker owns the work he (or she) does and has full responsibility for its quality. This includes not just doing the job right, but taking responsibility for the best way to do the job. At the core of this is a fundamental re-ordering of the role of manager.

Instead of "management by command and control," Deming set the standard for "management by objective." In working with Toyota, he was working with a production system that has already made huge strides in the same direction. Where Taylor looked at individual production steps and sought to streamline each one, driven by efficiency, Toyota had already come to understand the value of looking at the entire system, focused on minimizing waste (starting with overproduction).

The Toyota Production System (TPS) benefited from committed, consistent leadership that lived the principles they preached. Specifically, managers understood that their role was to give the workers the tools and support they need, not only to do their jobs, but to improve them. In some ways, it's the workers who tell the managers how to do the job. Deming provided an overall structure, and statistical evidence, that allowed Toyota to compete with the big boys.

Toyota was clearly successful. Virtually every other automaker has tried to adopt their approach, which has been a great boon for management consultants. And though they may be trying to replicate the results generated by Deming, these conusltants seem to be channeling Taylor and scientific management.

To me, the key thing is that the culture of management by command and control is deeply ingrained in virtually every corporate culture in the world. That is the default position: "to justify the title and salary of a manager it's my job to know more than they do and to show it by telling them what to do and how to do it." And because that's the expectation going in, the average management consultant is going to have to align with that if he (or she) wants to keep working. Or get into talking about "tools" or "best practices" or "targets": all anathema to someone immersed in Deming and TPS.

As the New Yorker article points out, even the acolytes of Taylor came to realize it could not deliver what it promised. But something about the dream of "efficiency" continues to keep Taylorism alive and well. And not just in corporate culture.