scientific management

2: General and Industrial Management – H. Fayol’s Theory of Administration

For this episode, we are reading part of Henri Fayol's central 1916 work, General and Industrial Management (first translated into English in 1929, but not published in the United States until 1949). In this work Fayol clearly outlined the five distinct elements of management and the fourteen principles that he believed should guide managers in administering those elements.

Your Kitchen Probably Comes from F. W. Taylor!

It might sound strange at first, but the impact of Taylor's ideas went way beyond factory work and production! The attention for optimizing work activities was taken up by numerous others, the Gilbreth couple perhaps being the most famous ones. Check out the photos in this special post to learn if your kitchen was a product of scientific management!

1: Principles of Scientific Management – F.W. Taylor’s One Best Way

Presents the seminal text that defined Taylorism and scientific management, a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. The ‘Principles of Scientific Management’ proposed a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. Taylor decried the waste of effort and resources that resulted from inefficient management practices, and thus proposed a science-based way of analyzing and reorganizing both the work and the management of it.