Presenting the BetaCodex (#6)

When Frederick Taylor published his landmark book “The Principles of Scientific Management“, in 1911, he suggested ”management“ as a revolution that would solve the problems of the industrial-age organization. Above all, Taylor pioneered the concept of dividing an organization between “thinking people” (managers) and “executing people” (workers) – thus inventing management as a class, and as thinking principals of the non-thinking “human resources”. Taylor also pioneered the functional division of organizations. Taylors methods and concepts were soon unmasked as inhuman and non-scientific and his consulting methods as rather ineffective. But the concept of division did nonetheless became widely adopted after his death, in 1915.  Management, as we know it today, is not much different from what Taylor proposed, 100 years ago. In today's dynamic and complex markets, however, tayloristic command and control management is proving more and more obsolete and toxic for both organizational performance and human and social advancement. We now call tayloristic management “Alpha”.