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So, this innovation is scientific management or what some people call Taylorism after Frederick Taylor, whose
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great patron was Joseph Wharton when he was at Bethlehem Steel. And this is the idea of thinking about
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work in the same way you might think about production operations and maybe with machines and figure out the best
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way to perform individual tasks, the order in which to perform them, how jobs could be stacked in sensible ways to
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make the organization as a whole more efficient. Well, this all started here in Philadelphia and a lot of it around the
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Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. It's credited to Frederick Taylor, who was working in Philadelphia.
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He had went to work in [music] a production shop and he was really disturbed to see that the workers were
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not moving fast. They seemed to be intentionally slowing things down. [music] The way work was organized then
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is that there would be a lead worker who knew what they were doing, a skilled person, and then there were a bunch of
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people who really worked for that skilled person. Taylor was trying to figure out, there's got to be a better
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way to organize this work. So, he sort of set about trying to figure out how you could reorganize simple tasks to
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make them more efficient. The way you see it today, for example, every time you go into a shop, like you
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go get your hair cut, you'll go to a desk where there's a receptionist there and then you'll go sit down with a
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stylist, maybe, and they say, "What do you want?" Then they send you to somebody else who washes your hair. They
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bring you back, the stylist cuts your hair, somebody else maybe blow-dries it, somebody else takes your money. That's
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Taylorism. And the idea is we're going to take a job and we're going to figure out the separate tasks. And part of it
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is we're going to move the simple tasks to cheaper people. We began to realize this kind of approach to work also can
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drive workers crazy because it's so boring. If you narrow their work down and they're only doing one thing like
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[music] a machine all the time. So, the high water mark of balancing human needs with this kind of rational
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machine-like approach is something called lean production where employees were given the task of really becoming
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the industrial engineers, the people who would lay out the way to do these tasks.
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When engineers do it, the employees get bored because they don't have any control over what they're doing. When
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the employees are doing it themselves, which is what lean production was about, then they were engaged in it and it
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seemed to go pretty well. This is the Toyota manufacturing system. We are seeing a big resurgence of
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interest in scientific management, and a lot of it has come with the AI revolution. And inside organizations to
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put these tools in place, you have to kind of rethink work and figure out, you know, where is the best way to put an
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agent in an AI tool, and then how do you think about reorganizing the work afterwards. So, at the moment, what we
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have is a battle going on a little bit because the AI people are retaking control in
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some cases away from employees and trying to do sort of top-down reorganization of work. And in
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particular, this issue of the balance between the human and the machine approach. I guess what I'm hoping is,
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particularly with this AI wave and rethinking a lot of the way work is being done, that we will
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bring back this kind of thoughtful balance of the two.