Most businesspeople respect and even revere Peter Drucker. Far fewer remember Frederick Winslow Taylor and, if they do, may not so much revere him as blame him for trying to turn people into machines. But Drucker believed that Taylor’s work was responsible for an “unprecedented rise” in the productivity of the “manual worker.” And that, Drucker said was a really good thing.
We swim in an alphabet soup of acronyms. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of it. Most of them don’t mean much, and while they may save a writer the trouble of spelling out whole words, they often send a reader to Google in search of a meaning. So, I wouldn’t add a single teaspoonful to this very bland brew if I hadn’t come across an acronym you can actually use—and that you will want to use.
In 1898, thirteen years before he published his groundbreaking Principles of Scientific Management, productivity guru Frederick Winslow Taylor was hired by Bethlehem steel to improve the performance of the 600 men the company employed to
Frederick Winslow Taylor, whose 1911 Principles of Scientific Management rationalized manual work processes to make them dramatically more productive, has been lauded by the likes of Peter Drucker as the man who made possible “all
