We are soon to greet (egad!) another century. And since it's been more than 100 years since the emergence of management science, it is, perhaps, reasonable to wonder what the last century has taught us that we can make use of in the next one.
By now we have mastered the idea that we manage in changing times. But we are still, a survey of recent books and articles indicates, grappling with the notion that there is no single prescription for how to run a company, how to manage people, how to get results. Indeed, the companies that leaders in business thought are talking and writing about have been integrating ideas and practices from a wide spectrum of management paradigms. As is appropriate for a time in which each successive challenge is little like the one just past, they have also been forging new paths to results. In a way, the task of the post-modern manager is to make it up as he goes along.
The history of modern management has been characterized by the
swing of a pendulum, propelled to one end of its arc by the work
of Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, and
then pulled to the other by the tenets of humanistic management.
We must, of course, live the future to know it. But today's
organizations to watch are taking the best of these two schools
and from them synthesizing new ways to manage.
What we should know about "the one best way"
Managers who must assess the avalanche of advice now
available may wish to arm themselves with a basic insight: We have been working during
an era of revisionism, in which the work of Frederick Taylor has
been reassessed, assailed, appreciated, and otherwise reviewed so
as to make way for a more human approach to business.
With his stopwatch, his "time-motion studies," his "one best way" of performing every activity in any workplace, and his abrasive, neurosis-ridden personality, Taylor redefined the work of both the employee and the manager by proclaiming that the elements of work were identifiable and reproducible. Robert Kanigel, author of The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, an exhaustive exploration of Taylor's work, says that "Anyone who has any regard for having a say-so over his work would not want Frederick Taylor for a boss, because the very nature of Taylorism is to have those on high decree exactly how work is to be done."
Taylorism was in some respects exactly right for its time. As one reviewer of The One Best Way noted, rigidly prescribed procedures were appropriate for an early 20th-century American workforce that was largely uneducated, uncomfortable with the language, and unaccustomed to the factory. But the force with which Taylor's machine-age mentality gripped us is evident in the fate of a little-known book called Eupsychian Management. An excursion by psychologist Abraham Maslow into the intricacies of workplace productivity, the book was published in 1965, but little noticed until this year. Remarkably, this volume introduced the term "enlightened management" and the idea of business "synergy." It urged managers to share power with their "teams" and to pursue "continual improvement." Yet it was almost entirely overlooked at the time of its publication. It is a sign of our new love affair with humanistic management that Maslow's long-buried work is receiving new attention: Eupsychian Management will be reissued by publisher John Wiley & Sons.
Scientific management was a product of its time, and the times did change. As the workforce became more educated, labor unions found a voice in the way companies ran, and secular humanism became a way of American life, Taylor's ideas came to be seen as villainous. Scientific management, Stuart Crainer tells us in The Ultimate Business Library: 50 Books That Shaped Management Thinking, rests on "a dehumanizing reliance on measurement" that leaves "no room for individual initiative or imagination." Writing in the same anthology, Gary Hamel says that "In Taylor's vision, man and machine worked together like clockwork." But man did not want to be one with the machine. He wanted to be free of it.
Managers and machines
Management, we are now told, isn't about machines, or
workers, or even technology. It's about people. In their
introduction to "Looking Ahead: Implications of the
Present," a series of essays by Peter Drucker, Peter Senge,
and other leading business thinkers, the editors of Harvard
Business Review note that "[E]ach thinker, in his or
her own way, has identified challenges that are not so much
technical or rational as they are cultural: how to lead the
organizations that create and nurture knowledge; how to know when
to set our machines aside and rely on instinct and
judgment....The continuing challenge for executives, their
collective observations suggest, is not technology, but the art
of human-and humane-management."
The idea that an organization is a community of people who share interests, rituals, habits, and goals, rather than a machine for the creation of goods and wealth, is found with increasing frequency in the business literature. As Charles Handy says in HBR's "Looking Ahead," "Free people do not relish being the instruments of others....The core members of communities are more properly regarded as citizens rather than as employees or 'human resources.'"
Humanistic thinking has, in fact, opened up a path for the expression in the workplace of that which is most quintessentially human: initiative and generativity. The Individualized Corporation, a new book by London Business School professor Sumantra Ghoshal and Harvard Business School professor Christopher A. Bartlett, may represent the apotheosis of humanistic management theory. Extending the now-familiar idea that respected, empowered workers are productive workers, Ghoshal and Bartlett suggest that the strength of an organization lies not just in people, but in what Bartlett calls "a fundamental belief in the individual."
Reproducing human ingenuity
The idea that institutions can literally profit by
tapping our "humanness"—rather than by asking humans to
act like machines—is one that business leaders can expect to hear
more about.
Asea Brown Boveri (ABB), a Swiss-based electrical engineering company with more than 1,000 different subsidiaries around the world, is now being cited with increasing frequency for such capabilities. W.F. Glavin, president of Babson College, which offers a leading graduate business program for entrepreneurs, said that ABB "wrote the book on global management." He named it one of the six or seven best-managed companies in the world.
In The Individualized Corporation, Ghoshal and Bartlett assert that ABB is able to achieve breakthrough results because it walks the humanistic talk: It pushes individual managers to take initiative. When ABB acquired an industrial relays business from Westinghouse in 1989, for example, the operation had been modestly profitable, but had exhibited little growth. Four years later, revenues had increased more than 45 percent, and profits by 120 percent. "This might have been just another impressive but otherwise unremarkable turnaround," Ghoshal and Bartlett write, were it not that the "transformation was accomplished by the same management team that had previously delivered the flat sales and break-even profitability."
Howling at the chains
In turning to the idea of companies "built on the
bedrock of human initiative" (as Ghoshal and Bartlett
characterize them), post-modern management thought is integrating
keystone ideas that began with Taylorism and evolved into
humanistic management. It is common today to see humanistic
management as superior business practice-a doctrine that
overthrew scientific management, in much the same
cast-off-your-chains way that the July Revolution is portrayed in
the stage version of Les Miserables.
In fact, however, both the stock market and the global economy continue to reward the managerial mania for efficiency that is Taylor's legacy. "In a global economy, there is simply no place for inefficiency to hide," writes Hamel in The Ultimate Business Library. "You have to believe that Frederick Winslow Taylor would have loved Wal-Mart, Sony, or Federal Express—modern icons of efficiency."
We must, of course, integrate the lessons of the past in order to move into the future. As Hamel says, "The development of modern management theory is the story of two quests: to make management more scientific, and to make it more humane. It is wrong to look at the latter quest as somehow much more enlightened than the former." Scientific management is perhaps more responsible than any other single idea for the standard of living enjoyed by most people in most developed countries today. And despite our attraction to humanistic management, its techniques are still the subject of far more talk than action, even though the companies that have introduced and supported them have traced results to the bottom line.
In Taylor's vision—and Kanigel suggests, in our reaction to it—"lies the great paradox of modern life. Each day we reap the material benefits of the cult of workplace efficiency that he championed; yet we chafe, we scream, we howl, we protest at the psychic chains in which it grips us." Perhaps the examples of ABB and other companies—such as Microsoft and GE—are most important because they demonstrate how radically the work of the manager has changed again. Managing today is nothing less than deciding when the past will provide guidelines and directions; knowing when we must depart from the lessons of history; and having the courage to leap.
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