The part of Frederick Taylor will be played by Eddie Haskell

One of the better blogs about 'Lean' manufacturing and Toyota Production System (TPS) is written and managed by Mark Graban, which see, and I revel in knowing that professionals are still focused on improving our industrial base.

I have noticed, however, that lean proponents seem to place themselves in direct counterpoint to the work of one Frederick Taylor of the late nineteenth century. Taylor was one of the first practitioners of what we now know as the science of management. Sometimes the dialogue with lean folks invokes the word 'Taylorism' as if to describe what are surely unspeakable draconian practices taking place under the low hanging sulfur clouds wafting about in the factory boiler house. This allusion may be quite unconscious.

Taylor broke new ground in task modeling at a time when few, if any, understood the path which industrialization would take.
Industry as we know it today grew from cottage and craft endeavors managed by trades masters who taught their apprentices the craft and set the expectation for the 'how much' and 'when' for the produce of the workplace. The market view was inside out: so long as the shop was busy, then the shop was being efficient.

Following the lead of Adam Smith, Taylor understood that true wealth/efficiency begins with the division of labor much like butchers with excess meat selling some cuts along with the tallow to the candler who has no farm to raise livestock, nor any care to do so. The butcher and the candler are serving each other's needs and creating an ad hoc 'kanban' or sorts.

The nascent industrial age followed much the same paradigm by subdividing the crafts into subgroups which serve each other's needs. No individual craft could create the entire product so the cottage becomes compartmentalized. As economies of scale were realized from the subdivisions of labor and craft, there was room for the industry proper to increase it's measure. For example, foundries could cast many products from one 'heat' using this compartmentalized construct. Going even further into the division of labor, industry soon came to understand that training a person to be good in one task, or task group, was more economically efficient than cross training a group of people who would then rotate their tasks, as did cottage craftsmen. This would have created a group of highly skilled and experienced managers whose experience levels were beyond that required for the basic work at hand.

Taylor modeled each work function (task) and through methodical observation and statistical metrics was able to discover waste within each process which could then be engineered out of the process. The present day TPS task modeling and analysis is really not that far removed from Taylor's studies except that Taylor took his 'task allocation' to the granular levels where man ceased using a tool for craft and became caretaker to the machine.

This calls to mind a particularly appropriate reference taken from Chris Alexander's work:

"The craftsman himself", says Ananda Coomaraswamy, a man equally competent to talk about the Modern West as the Ancient East, "the craftsman himself can always, if allowed to, draw the delicate distinction between the machine and the tool. The carpet loom is a tool, a contrivance for holding warp threads at a stretch for the pile to be woven round them by the craftsman's fingers; but the power loom is a machine, and its significance as a destroyer of culture lies in the fact that it does the essentially human part of the work".

Taylor was no saint, but his work seems to be carried on even today by those who strive to improve the lives of the many through the toil of the few, to mildly paraphrase Adam Smith.