Taylorism
Maybe the man had a point
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If you have read Team of Teams by Stanley McChrystal you may or may not have noticed that he made a few mistakes. When talking about Adam Nicoloson’s Seize The Fire, he says that the purpose of the French fleet that Lord Nelson destroyed at the Battle of Trafalgar was to invade England. This is incorrect. Nicoloson addresses this common misunderstanding directly in Seize the Fire, which makes me think Stanley didn’t actually read the book. He also clearly misunderstands Taleb based on how dismissive he was of Taleb’s ideas in Team of Teams. McChrystal also argues that the world has changed fundamentally over the past few decades with the advent of the internet and the increased interdependence brought about by globalization. This change, McChrystal argues, means that we have to lead differently than we have in the past. We must move to being more network centric and less hierarchical. We must be more focused on speed and agility rather than efficiency and precision.
McChrystal contrasts this “new” way of doing business with the “old” way of doing things, exemplified by Frederick Winslow Taylor and his style of management known as “Scientific Management” or “Taylorism.” (Watch the video above for an excellent demonstration of Taylorism in action). The popular summary of Taylorism, which you can find in a variety of online sources, is that in Taylorism one should examine a task, break it down into its component parts, identify the most efficient way to perform the task, train the worker in this most efficient way, and incentivize the worker to perform the task quickly; usually, this means a payment scheme that isn’t based on the hours worked or the daily day as was the custom.
According to McChrystal, Taylorism was great for linear work with defined boundaries, like making steel, but it doesn’t work in the modern world, with our more complex environments with volatility and ambiguity. Taylorism, according to McChrystal, is a thing of the past, a way that backward armies fight and dinosaur corporations do business. Advanced armies and modern corporations, on the other hand, embrace decentralized structures and push decision-making authority to the lowest level. They don’t demand uniformity and machine-like behavior.
As my long-time readers know, I have often advocated for this type of approach. This is evident in:
But in this essay and in the the next few essays, I am going to examine times when the decentralized approach is not the only approach, and indeed is not the most ideal approach. Sometimes centralization of effort and command is not only preferred but necessary. And when a leader centralizes command, the leader must demand compliance and enforce strict protocols to ensure that orders are adhered to. Taylorism is not a thing of the past that should be discarded, but a legitimate approach in a variety of contexts and organizations.
McChrystal isn’t the only one that attacks Taylor. He is the favorite whipping boy of many modern management gurus. They claim that Taylorism “dehumanizes” people, takes away their autonomy, and limits creativity and innovation. For my readers who consume a lot of leadership content, I have no doubt that you have been presented with, and may ardently believe, that Taylorism is a pernicious evil and that we must rid ourselves of it. Taylorism, according to anyone who knows, is bad, very bad.
But is this true?
How do you know Taylorism is bad? Is it because you studied Taylor’s book? Is it because someone like McChrystal told you it was bad? Is Taylorism really what you think it is?
Why is anti-Taylorism so firmly ensconced in many (not all) leadership and management circles? I have my suspicions about why he is hated, but we’ll leave those for another time.1
Whenever someone wants to criticize Taylor, they present the following quotation as representative of his work:
“Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation that he shall be so stupid (my emphasis) and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word "percentage" has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful”
Well, I went and read Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, to see if his critics are as right as they think they are.
Here is the bottom line: Taylor was writing about building things with low-skilled, low-paid people. Taylor was certainly an elitist who believed, as was common at the time, that people are born or sorted into natural hierarchies. In his mind, “stupid” was a natural level of intelligence and it was the duty of those more intelligent to lead the less intelligent. This grinds on our more modern and egalitarian view of humanity, but it makes Taylor a man of his time, not a monster.
And speaking of Taylor’s time, the level of poverty the world over was staggering by modern standards. About 60% of people in America lived in poverty when Taylor was working and writing around the turn of the 20th century.2 The poverty rate is around 11% these days in the U.S. It is hard for moderns to fathom just how little food most people had, let alone money for the luxury items that even most low-income people have today (TV, Cell Phone, Microwave oven).
Rather than allow the poor to wallow in their poverty, Taylor’s way offered a path for poor people to increase their income through hard work and industriousness. His thinking was that increased efficiency would bring increased profits for companies and higher wages for workers. Critics leave out the quotations which serve as the crux of Taylor’s arguments.
Scientific management, on the contrary, has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the two (labor and management) are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employee, and vice versa; and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants—high wages—and the employer what he wants—a low labor cost—for his manufactures.
-The Principles of Scientific Management pg. ONE!
He was also very clear about how workers should be treated. He wanted managers who were proactive, who set the example, who worked just as hard as their laborers, albeit differently.
…the management must take over and perform much of the work which is now left to the men; almost every act of the workman should be preceded by one or more preparatory acts of the management which enable him to do his work better and quicker than he otherwise could. And each man should daily be taught by and receive the most friendly help from those who are over him, instead of being, at the one extreme, driven or coerced by his bosses, and at the other left to his own unaided devices. This close, intimate, personal cooperation between the management and the men is of the essence of modern scientific or task management.
-The Principles of Scientific Management pg. 10.
In another demonstration of how Taylor cared for both the workers and the work that they did, Taylor was asked to consult on the process of inspecting small bicycle parts. Before Taylor, the women (it was only women working in this particular job), worked 10.5 hours per day. Taylor recommended that the workday be shortened over the period of a few weeks to 8.5 hours per day, but that the women still receive the same daily wage. He then noticed that the women slowed down their work significantly after about 90 minutes of continuous work. So, he advised that the workers be given a 10-minute break every 1hr and 15min to leave their seats, walk around and socialize with each other.
To be clear, his focus was efficiency and productivity. he didn’t just shorten the workday and give the workers regular breaks. He also moved their chairs far enough apart so they couldn’t chit-chat on the job. He wanted workers to work harder and more efficiently, but to be treated better and paid more.
Does this sound like an uncaring monster?
Increasing efficiency meant eschewing the old ways of doing things, which was to leave how the work was accomplished up to the individual laborers. Under Taylorism, workers were told not only what to do, but also the most efficient way to complete their assigned tasks.
This paper will show that the underlying philosophy of all of the old systems of management in common use makes it imperative that each workman shall be left with the final responsibility for doing his job practically as he thinks best, with comparatively little help and advice from the management.
Principles of Scientific Management pg. 9
So when McChrystal proposes a “new” way of leading organizations, it is really the old-old way. McChrystal thinking is (and the old-old thinking was) that the laborers who are closest to the work will know how best to accomplish it. So, management should set a daily wage and then allow the workmen to do their business with little oversight. As it turned out, leaving the work up to the laborers with little input or leadership led to inefficiencies. One of the biggest problems which Taylor sought to address was sheer laziness on the part of the workers. For a worker, the thinking was simple: why work harder if the daily wage is the same? The workers in many jobs had no incentive to be efficient or to work as hard as they could.
But Taylor figured out that if he could figure out how to motivate workers and eliminating other inefficiencies his clients could produce more at lower cost which would lead to more revenue and higher wages.
Taylor went so far as to argue that how the work is done should not be left to the workers. Rather, managers should determine the most efficient way to perform a task, and then demand that of the workers. This, of course, is anathema to the “Patton Doctrine” of “Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.” But Patton wasn’t running a factory, he was running an Army. And this quote is more about how leaders should delegate tasks to other leaders, not how every task ought to be accomplished.
An artillery gun line, for example, should not be run willy-nilly with each person doing what they think is best. A gun line should operate like a well-oiled machine, a machine that would make Taylor proud.
Does this look like decentralization? Does this look like letting people surprise you with their ingenuity? Does it look like these jarheads give a damn about VUCA? Do these gun-bunnies need to be brilliant tacticians? No.
When it comes to their primary job, firing artillery, they need to have a well-rehearsed and highly efficient system for loading, firing, and moving their guns.
This is one example of the importance of Taylorism in war. Everyone in that gun team must do their very narrow job without thinking. They must be so attuned to it that they can do it for hours on end, at night, in the rain, under enemy counterfire.
Taylor’s ideas are meant for a high-compliance, low-complexity environments in which low-skilled labor is required.
Even though these are some of the most common environments found in our world, they almost entirely neglected in popular leadership books like Team of Teams and TED talks about leadership. Why? Because fast food managers and oil rig foremen and manufacturing shift supervisors don’t read leadership books. Leadership books and TED talks are mostly about leading office workers in low-stakes jobs. No one’s life is at risk, non-compliance can go under the radar without anyone getting hurt. It is more fun and stimulating to read about complexity and fractal network design and the importance of agility and flexibility in a world full of uncertainty. No one wants to read about how to design incentive schemes to try to get marginally better work out of unmotivated and / or low skilled people.
In the next Big War that America fights, it is not out of the realm of possibility that the government may be forced to institute a draft. While the all-volunteer force has been incredible since the draft ended, a future conflict against a peer adversary may once again make a draft necessary. In such an environment, it may be useful for leaders to think about compliance. Using force and fear alone to gain compliance is not a good long-term strategy, and there are other ways to get compliance. Leaders must know how to harmonize compliance-based methods of influence and commitment-based methods of influence depending on the situation. One of the best examples of this kind of leadership comes from David Hackworth’s Steel My Soldiers’ Hearts, and I highly recommend it to all leaders.
Scale is only one factor in determining whether or not a Taylorite approach is appropriate. Taylorism is easy to see at small scale because the tasks are all visible. At small scale it is easy to see how all the individual tasks can be best performed and then fit together. Although increased scale makes Taylorism more difficult to visualize, it can still be applied.
Taylorism applied to war at scale, while derided as foolish by McChrystal, may be not only useful but necessary in some cases. These are the cases that tend to rely on the allocation of scarce resources. In a major conflict, the US Army will not have unlimited rockets and artillery shells, among other things. Therefore, failure to manage those scarce resources carries significant risk.
An Army division is broken down into a number of brigades. If resources are simply decentralized to the brigades, then the division will be unable to mass fires on targets that it identifies as crucial for the success of the division as a whole. The division HQ also has the luxury of not being tied to the close fight, so it can (theoretically) look deeper into the battlefield to attack targets that will set the division up for success in the long run. For example, the division will be more focused on destroying the enemy’s deep long range fires assets, and their command and control, and their logistics. The division does this so that the brigades can focus on killing tanks and infantry and local command and control elements.
In other words, units at higher echelons should have a lower time preference when it comes to resource expenditure. If you are a colonel commanding a brigade you are more likely to have a mugh higher time preference than the division commander because you are closer to the actual fighting. A brigade commander may care less about tomorrow because he is focused on getting to tomorrow. If one of your companies gets pinned down, you are much more likely to let loose with as much ordnance as you can get your hands on to help save that company. You want to use your resources to help you get aggressive and make progress now! And if all resources are given to units that are in the close fight and have high time preference, those resources will not be expended most efficiently.
The division should, in theory, have a lower time preference than the brigades. This lower time preference means that the division is more willing to hold onto to scarce resources and use them on targets that will get them the most bang for their buck. The division might be willing to sacrifice a company by not giving them significant rocket and artillery support, so they can use their rockets and artillery on targets that will make it less likely that the division will lose whole battalions in the coming days.
This kind of centralization is exactly what happened in Desert Storm. During the air campaign, the Iraqi targets were centrally tracked and methodically destroyed. The firing assets were not simply handed to a conglomeration of subordinate commanders. Strategists determined the best types of targets to destroy to achieve the desired effect, the intelligence analysts located the systems associated with those targets, and air launched munitions atritted those systems. This was centralized destruction with a linear process carried out by a series of experts each doing their assigned role. This was Taylorism at war, at scale.
Going back to where we started with Stanley McChrystal, do you still think Taylorism is a thing of the past? Should the leaders and managers who work in high-compliance contexts abandon their search for more efficiency? Should the decentralized approach be implemented at all levels regardless of the task to be accomplished? Should resource allocation be done willy-nilly without a centralized plan? Certainly not.
Throughout this essay, I have been purposely glib and somewhat dismissive about the importance of understanding complexity. I am trying to jokingly drive home the point that knowing about complexity and uncertainty, while important, is not all there is. Sometimes stuff just has to get done, and it needs to get done in the most efficient way, and people have to be forced to do it the way you have decided they need to do it. Not every time, but sometimes.
The key is to understand the environment that you are in. Taylorism is useful if and only if it is applied in the correct context. The best leaders know when to maximize Taylorism and when to leverage complexity-based approaches.
In future essays, I will extrapolate on these ideas, probably in the context of warfare.
Until then!
Here is a sentence from Wikipedia, “Many of the critiques of Taylor come from Marxists.” Ideology is likely the driving force behind a lot of Taylor hate. Not that Taylor’s critics are all Marxists, but the Marxist critiques of Taylor took hold and have become the dominant retrospective viewpoint. A lot of the worst accusations are hearsay and come from union sympathizers who hated Taylor and his focus on meritocracy. There are some accusations that Taylor fabricated data, but I don’t put much stock into them.
The Free Market: Lifting All Boats - Foundation for Economic Education (fee.org)
Key concept most English-speaking thinkers fail to grasp: the importance of scale. Solutions that work at one level fail at another. The trick is unifying Taylorist big-picture thought with Clausewitzian decentralization - each at its proper place in the scale.
Higher-level commanders generate intentions, which flow down because war is politics/policy. Line personnel generate facts, which flow up. Each serves its own function in the system, their independence and interdependence responsible for generating adaptability.
Nerve endings tells brain what hurts. Brain comes up with strategy for avoiding the suck. Nerve impulse sent back down creates a range of possibilities the local fibers actuate, for lack of a better word springing to mind right now.
Since you seem to be in deep philosophy reading mode. Been there, good times!