Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged taylorism → View Popular, Search in Google

May

2012

Allow Generalists to Emerge

"The hierarchical organization is built on a concept of mass replication. Taylorite in its origins, the idea is to create replicable jobs.

The actual qualities of the incumbent are far less important than that they simply do what the position demands. These, in turn, are collected under managers.

The organization represents the elements of the design: the sub-assemblies of a machine.

Grafted onto this base are the knowledge worker functions. "

gettingvaluefromit.wordpress.com/...allow-generalists-to-emerge

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knowledgework taylorism knowledgeworkers

But knowledge work does not work well based on position.

It depends far more on the qualities of the person doing the work, the background they bring to the task.
What this means is that we can turn the specialists we hired into people who are a little more generalist in nature, capable of working outside their normal domain.
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- So perhaps it makes more sense to look at a group like this. Suppose there are 100 people in a department. Create 10 first-level managers. Their roles are not defined as subsets of the work, but by the nature of their reporting employees: the historians here, the functionalists there, etc.

Nov

2011

Why Taylorism prevails in the knowledge economy (and what to do about it)

"I have been blogging quite substantially about Lean Management lately and I have noticed a common purpose with Agile methodologies (which get me blogging 4 years ago) and Enterprise 2.0 (which has kept my blogging busy for the last 2 years) : they all address complexity and permanent change, the key characteristics of our business world. This is one of the key ideas of the great book by Yves Caseau Processus & Entrerprise 2.0 [FR]."

enterprise20blog.com/...conomy-and-what-to-do-about-it

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lean agility knowledgeeconomy organization management leanmanagement taylorism complexity behavioralsciences education middlemanagement

We use the latest technologies, we mention innovation in every other sentences and yet we lag behind manufacturing in terms of management innovation as they’ve successfully implemented Lean Management.
Right now, your company has 21st-century Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles.
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- didn’t have management educational background and who innovated in management because they never were told what NOT to do during an MBA.
- I’m not sure about MBA’s (we even have in France an Enterprise 2.0 Institute under the lead of Richard Collin). But for sure, these sciences are not taught in IT Universities as Laurent Bossavit noted.
- If we want people on organisations to understand the complexity we are in, to be able to assess how appropriate Lean/Agile/Enterprise 2.0 are to tackle it and how inappropriate Taylorism is, we need to add Cognitive and Behavioural sciences in their curriculum and trainings.
- Why would they spend their energy putting people in the best position to succeed, and losing all the credit they used to get from their team work ?
- learning requires humility. Managers enjoying their status are not really subject to humility.
- Middle Managers play a key role in the knowledge creation process. They synthetize the tacit knowledge of both front-line employees and senior executives, make it explicit, and incorporate it into new products and technologies
- Taylorism prevails because Agile / Enterprise 2.0 don’t provide enough credibility and factual data regarding what they’re bringing in terms of operational benefits
- Do not (only) rely on “rah rah” rhetoric to sell the case of Agile/Enterprise 2.0. Provide regular scientifically measured set of data proving the value of these methodologies as Lean has been doing ever since it appeared.

May

2011

3 Must Read Articles on Management for Anyone Involved in Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business

"Gartner Research VP Mike Rollings is calling for an end to Taylorism as a management doctrine. "Humans have become cogs in business machinery pursuing efficiency," he writes. If you think that sounds radical, last year Wall Street Journal editor Allan Murray wrote a piece titled "The End of Management" decrying hierarchy, bureaucracy and encouraging business leaders to embrace change. "

www.readwriteweb.com/...ner-research-vp-mike-rolli.php

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management socialbusiness enterprise2.0 taylorism

Jun

2010

What Empowerment? Enterprise 2.0 Meets Taylorism!

"One buzzword of Enterprise 2.0 is EMPOWERMENT. The reasoning goes that empowerment leads to ownership, motivation, creativity, learning & growth, and superior performance, and so on (insert other organization development buzzwords here!). Proponents of the Enterprise 2.0 movement tell us what we should do and why, vis-à-vis empowerment. But, when it comes to the “how” in the real-world, the guidance is a bit sketchy."

allcollaboration.com/...rprise-20-meets-taylorism.html

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enterprise2.0 empowerment management management2.0 humanresources taylorism projectmanagement commandandcontrol

I recognize that the extreme of empowerment is anarchy and the extreme of command & control is dictatorship. Neither extreme is true, nor should it be. Extremes lay out the boundaries for discussion and action. We will always find ourselves in this spectrum of extremes. So, the issue I am raising is not either-or, instead, whether we are making progress towards the promise of Enterprise 2.0 as it relates to empowerment.