Tom Peters continued Learning and Towering Competence
Pocketblog has gone back to basics. This is part of an extended management course.
Over the years, Pocketblog has covered some important business strategy thinkers, so we will start by reviewing what we have.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy
This is the name of Richard Rumelt's book and it neatly frames any discussion of business strategy by defining what your outcome needs to look like. Take a look at 'What makes good business strategy?'
The Balanced Scorecard
In one of the all-time classic Harvard Business Review articles, Robert Kaplan and David Norton set out to ensure that our business strategies are balanced across a range of different areas of the business. The tool they introduced is nearly ubiquitous in the upper reaches of the management world, and no manager can get away without at least a passing familiarity with the Balanced Scorecard. Take a look at 'Balance is Everything'.
The McKinsey 7S Model
One of my own favourite tools is also about balance, but this time about ensuring all the elements of your business strategy and planning are all aligned. It was developed by consultants at top US firm, McKinsey: Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. The seven S model reminds us that shared values, style, skills, staff, structure, systems, and strategy must all be consistent with one another. Take a look at 'On Competition: Internal Forces and the 7-S Model'.
The Awesome Michael Porter
Over the years, three blogs have featured the thinking of business strategy specialist, Michael Porter.
'On Competition: Five Forces' briefly introduced two of his principal ideas: the five forces model and his three generic business strategies that flow from them.
'On Competition, again: Porter's Five Forces' took a deeper look at the five forces model.
'On Competition – The Far End of the Value Chain' focused on the three generic business strategies and his concept of the value chain. Here, I speculated that some businesses have found a fourth, very successful business strategy.
By the way, a recent entry in the Pocketblog Correspondence course returned to the idea of the value chain. Take a look at 'The Value Chain'.
The Boston Consulting Group Matrix
Having finished reviewing the archives, let's take a look at one business strategy tool. This is designed to help us answer a very simple question:
'We have a number of products (or services) but limited resources to invest in their development and marketing. Which products (or services) should we focus our investment on?'
The folk at Boston Consulting Group who developed the tool suggested that two considerations are paramount in making our judgements:
- What is our market share?
Do we have a dominant market position with this product/service, or a modest share. This dictates the base from which investment can grow or maintain our position. - What is the growth potential of the market?
Is this product in a growing, static or declining market? Clearly static and declining markets offer far less opportunity to recoup investments.
The result was a simple matrix that plots these two conditions against one-another and identifies four generic strategies. You can click on the image to enlarge it.
The Matrix gives us four strategies, three compelling labels for our products/services and one label that is, frankly, honest but lame.
Stars
Place your biggest investment bets on the products which dominate markets with high growth potential. If you are Samsung, you will be investing highly in mobile telephone products because the market continues to expand and you already have a dominant position.
Dogs
Do not invest – arguably, disinvest – in products which have a small share of a static or declining market. There is not much to win and you are not placed to take much of it.
Cash Cows
What do you do if you are a dominant player in a static or declining market? BCG suggested it is like having invested in a cow: you should look after it and milk it while it is healthy. This is how I read the men's razor market. If you are one of the big players in your region (Gillette, Wilkinson Sword, Bic, for example, here in the UK), then you have a lot of investment in products and marketing, and a strong, valuable revenue stream. Over investment can gain little, as the market will never expand until men grow two heads or we need to shave more of ourselves. But if you don't invest, you will lose the benefit of your position to your rivals. So, what do we see? Incremental investment in new – but hardly innovative – products. When I started shaving, two blades was new. Now we are up to five. By the time I no longer need to shave (about thirty years or so, I guess) I predict an eight bladed razor will be common.
Question Marks
What to call these pesky products… Does the label attach to the products or the challenge BCG found in labelling them with a cute title? Set aside that curious linguistic conundrum and we face the most difficult challenge of all. Your market is growing, so there is a big prize for the skilled/lucky investor. But your market position is weak, so you have a low chance of success against bigger rival products. Like many good tools, the BCG matrix does not give you all the answers. But it does bring your choices into stark relief.
From the Management Pocketbooks series:
- The Strategy Pocketbook
- Business Planning Pocketbook
Management literature is chock-full of books about the best companies and how to emulate them. Arguably the best of all these books is Tom Peters' and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence.
After 35 years, the book remains in print and, while some of its exemplars have not proved to show such enduring excellence, the ideas persist.
Tom Peters
We have covered Tom Peters in some depth in an earlier Pocketblog. He was born in 1942 and went to Cornell University on a US Navy scholarship. He earned a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering and served for four years in the US Navy. Following that, he got a PhD in Organisational Behaviour from Stanford University.
In 1974, he joined US management consulting firm McKinsey in their San Fransisco office, quickly becoming a partner. There, he took on a major research project looking at the organisational and implementation aspects of companies, while colleagues in the New York office got the plum research project around strategy.
As Peter's project matured, long-serving McKinsey colleague, Robert Waterman, became involved, and their work morphed into the McKinsey 7S Model and then into the book, In Search of Excellence.
Robert Waterman
Robert Waterman grew up in the US during the war and attended the Colorado School of Mines, where he graduated in 1958 with a Bachelor's degree in Geophysics. He then went on to gain an MBA from Stanford University in 1961.
He joined McKinsey in 1964 and remained with the firm until 1985, leaving as a senior director and a member of the Firm's Executive Committee. He working in Australia and the San Francisco office. It was in the latter that he met and started to work with Tom Peters on the project that would become the book, In Search of Excellence.
When Peters was fired from McKinsey for an article that was read as denigrating strategy in favour of operations and implementation, Waterman remained with the firm. Peters was granted 50 per cent of the royalties of the book the two were working on. McKinsey retained the 50per cent share for Waterman's half.
Eventually, this hard line rankled and Waterman left the firm. He co-founded energy firm AES, and served on a number of corporate boards. Increasingly his non-executive roles focus on not-for-profits.
The McKinsey 7S Model
In researching 'cool' companies, Peter began to assemble a humanistic set of criteria for what made them work well. He was working against the paradigm of rigid strategic planning and financial focus. This theme would be picked up again ten years later by Kaplan and Norton.
Working with Waterman and Julien Phillips, they synthesised his findings into seven mutually interacting areas of business focus that need to be addressed and co-ordinated.
We have written more fully about this framework in an earlier article.
In Search of Excellence
In Search of Excellence evolved from unstructured research into a two-day, 700-slide seminar that Peters gave in Germany, to Siemens. Invited to do the same for PepsiCo, Peters was requested to trim down and focus his presentation. The result was eight key lessons he drew from his research.
These eight lessons were to become the core eight chapters of In Search of Excellence:
- A bias for action
'Getting on with doing the job'. Rapid decision-making unhampered by bureaucracy. This has since morphed into the concept of 'Agility' . - Close to the customer
Trying to serve each customer as an individual. This has since become business orthodoxy. - Autonomy and entrepreneurship
Each part of the business acts as an entrepreneurial centre, rather than as a part of a machine. This creates greater innovation. Now, of course, entrepreneurialism is part of the zeitgeist. - Productivity through people
Individual contributors are the source of quality. Peters and Waterman were fundamentally in the humanist management tradition. - Hands-on, value-driven
The 7-S framework started with shared vales. These need to guide everyday practice. - Stick to the knitting
Stay with the business that you know; your core competencies. Diversification carries big risks. - Simple form, lean staff
Some of the best companies have small headquarters and simple process. What company or public authority has escaped the 'Lean' revolution? - Simultaneous loose-tight properties
Centralised values, but autonomous operational choices combine the stability of a large organisation with the adaptability of a small one. Many start-ups are seeing the same challenge as they grow, from the opposite direction to Peters' and Waterman's large corporations.
After the Search
Both Peters and Waterman followed up the book with their own takes on what next and, in particular, addressing the shortcomings of their earlier research. But apart from one fascinating interview, I don't think they have worked together since the two or three years of touring, following the release of their book.
That's a shame. Two remarkable minds came together and, arguably, each did their best work in collaboration with the other.
It's just a few people who could claim to have invented an academic discipline, but one who could, with some justice, is Alfred D Chandler. He was a historian who studied business, and in so doing, he inferred large historical patterns that still inform our thinking.
Short Biography
Alfred DuPont Chandler was born in 1918 into a Delaware family that had commerce in its blood. In one branch of his family was grandfather Henry Poor, of Standard and Poors, and in another was the duPont family. He studied for a Masters degree at Harvard College before the war, where he was a friend of John F Kennedy. After service in a non-combat role, he returned to Harvard to finish his Masters and earn his PhD with a study of Henry Poor and the coming of the American railroads..
An appointment to MIT allowed him to study more large corporations in depth. His analysis of duPont, General Motors, Standard Oil, and Sears Roebuck & Co led to the publication in 1962 of the first of his three most noteworthy books (among over 25 in total): Strategy and Structure.
He also worked for a while at Johns Hopkins University, before returning Harvard in 1970, as the Isidor Strauss Professor of Business History at the Harvard Business School. There, he wrote his second major work, 1977's The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business. This exceptional work won Chandler the Pulitzer Prize for History, and was the first business book to be recognised with a Pulitzer Prize. The title is a deliberate reply to Adam Smith, whose 'invisible hand' is the market. We'll see what Chandler was referring to in a moment.
In 1990, Chandler published the last of his three major books,Scale and Scope: Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. In this he shows that it is not just scale of operations that bestows big economies and hence competitive advantage. It is also scope – capturing a diverse spread of markets early on. Uncharacteristically, Chandler looked to economics and borrowed the term 'first mover advantage'.
Having retired from the Harvard faculty in 1989, Chandler continued to work, write and comment on changes in business, and was a visiting professor at numerous institutions. He died in May 2007.
Themes of Alfred Chandler's Work
Chandler's approach of wide-ranging comparative analysis to find historical patterns of evolution and change initially encountered a lot of resistance from the academic business community. These academics favoured using economic and quantitative analysis to build their theories, but Chandler was able to change many (though not all) attitudes. Today's business school focus on case studies and the rise to prominence of academics and writers like Jim Collins.
Strategy before Structure
The primary thesis of Chandler's 'Strategy and Structure' is that strategy must come before (and therefore dictate) the structure of the corporation. His historical observations led him to conclude that market forces need to drive shifts in the way organisations evolve, and he was able to predict the increasing trend for decentralisation that continues, in the largest businesses, today.
More recently, academic and business commentators have disagreed. Tom Peters observes that it is structure that determines which strategy a corporation will select, and Richard Tanner Pascale argued that Chandler assumed that organisations act rationally. They don't, and he also notes that organisational structures play a big role in shaping strategy.
Trust Gary Hamel to sort it out, by seeing the subtlety of the competing views. He notes that the two are intertwined: new challenges lead to new structures, and new structures present new challenges. He concludes:
'Few historians were prescient. Chandler was.'
Arguably, Chandler is, along with Igor Ansoff, one of the founding advocates of the study of business strategy.
Professional Management
Chandler also charted the rise of professional management; first in Strategy and Structure and then, more fully, in The Visible Hand. He saw managerially led corporations in the US rise with the growth of the railways and the need for complex, geographically-spread, systems. These first arose within the railway companies, and then in the corporations that grew nationally, due to the opportunities that long-distance transport offered.
It was the visible hand of an organisation's managers that replaced Smith's invisible hand of the market as a major driver of the structure of a modern business.
Further Reading
I rarely cite another website for further reading about our Management Thinkers, but in this case, I am compelled by the excellence of the article at the Strategy + Business site. I have deliberately avoided borrowing from it. If you are interested in Chandler, this should be your next port of call.
Pick your favourite epithet: Tom Peters has been described as a gadfly, a showman, a curmudgeon, , an agent of chaos, and a guru (even an uber-guru). He is all of these and more. Whatever his contribution to management thinking, Tom Peters certainly has been influential, becoming a multi-millionaire on book sales alone.
Brief Biography
Tom Peters was born in 1942 and grew up in Baltimore. He went to Cornell University on a US Navy scholarship, where he earned a bachelor's degree in Civil Engineering. He then served for four years in the US Navy, including a tour in Vietnam and one at the Pentagon. Following that, he went to Stanford University, gaining a PhD in Organisational Behaviour, in 1973.
In 1974, he joined US management consulting firm McKinsey, where he quickly became a partner in 1977. The firm specialised (and still does) in corporate strategy, but Peters soon discerned that their offering was poorly rooted in what was actually happening in large US corporations. He took on a major research project.
When he left McKinsey in 1981, he (along with co-author, Robert Waterman) used some of that research as the basis of his first book: 'In Search of Excellence'. This drew lessons from what they then viewed as 'America's best-run corporations'. The book became a multi-million dollar best-seller, and created a reputation that Peters went on to capitalise upon fully. He pursues his business interests through The Tom Peters Company.
A series of books have followed, each one supplanting the last, as Peters senses and responds to the changes in the business environment. We'll look at his ideas through four of them, but a fuller list includes:
- 1982: In Search of Excellence (with Robert Waterman)
- 1985: A Passion for Excellence (with Nancy Austin)
- 1987: Thriving on Chaos
- 1992: Liberation Management
- 1994: The Tom Peters Seminar: Crazy Times call for Crazy Organisations
- 1994: The Pursuit of Wow!
- 1997: The Circle of Innovation
- 1999: The Project 50, The Brand You 50
- 2003: Re-Imagine!
In Search of Excellence
In studying 43 organisations – among the biggest (and, at the time, what they thought were the best) in America, Peters and Waterman drew some simple conclusions about what made them the best. These organisations included P+G, HP, GE, IBM, J+J, and some others that were not best represented by initials! Among the conclusions that they drew were that excellence comes from doing the basics, but doing them extraordinarily well.
Other conclusions were that the best organisations:
- had a strong bias towards action and implementation
- paid close attention to their customers
- had a great concern for their people
- celebrated trial and error experimentation, rather than didactic implementation of a nice theory
- believed management was about managing the corporation's values
- stuck to their core competences: 'sticking to the knitting'
At the heart of this was a rather nice model that the authors developed while at McKinsey: The 7S Model. This started an anti-rationalist trend that has grown in Peters' thinking – moving away from data-driven and numerical models of business strategy and behaviour (that his engineering background might lead us to expect) to a more strongly humanistic and subsequently near-random view of how organisations should work. In simple terms, the 7S model asserts that organisations need to fully integrate shared goals with strategy, systems, style (culture), staff, skills, and structure.
None of their conclusions seemed revolutionary. Indeed, this was the strength of the book – a huge body of evidence supporting good common sense. The authors have always acknowledged this.
Oops!
Sadly, it was not long before evidence emerged that some of 'America's best run corporations' were not, in fact, doing so well. Happily for Peters and Waterman, though, the book had already sold millions – and continued to sell well. But Peters felt the need for a response. This came, in book form, in 1987, with…
Thriving on Chaos
Why were the lessons of In Search of Excellence not always predictive of success? Because the rules of business have changed. We are in a time, Peters said, of uncertainty and accelerating change – what we now call a VUCA world (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous). This led him to state, memorably:
'There are no excellent companies'
In a changing world, companies need to change – sticking to the knitting will not give you the flexibility you need to survive. This is a point that is being made afresh by the subject of last week's Pocketblog, Nilofer Merchant.
Despite this, Peters still believed the core of In search of Excellence was valid, but that we need to add new thinking:
- Constant innovation
- An obsession with being totally responsive to our customer
- Leadership that embraces – no, loves – change
- An orientation towards partnership
The rules had changed, and it was not long before Peters was on the track of the new master-rules for success. In 1992, he introduced his new thinking, with…
Liberation Management
Don't just respond to customers, build your organisation around creating, maintaining and growing your relationships with customers. The future, said Peters, will be all about flexibility and interconnected social networks. Corporations will need to be agile, forming and re-forming teams and structures rapidly. And what is the unit of exchange in these organisations? Knowledge. Not only is it the primary capital of the new economy, but it is the currency that buys ideas and innovation.
Liberation management was a very clear start of a shift in Peters' thinking towards informal, radical, crazy business thinking, that reached its zenith (some would say nadir) with…
Re-Imagine!
This startling book is the acme of later Tom Peters style. It completes the journey from a dull academic thesis, to a highly readable but conventional first book, to innovative ideas presented in a folksy, simple way, to the soundbite driven 50List books, to this mix of text, images, soundbites and shouts. It rehearses many of his earlier ideas and presents them in a startling and repetitive way. By turns, the book is provocative, insightful and infuriating. At places, I found it literally unreadable. Look at the Amazon reviews – for such a prominent author, they are, to say the least, unusual.
So what is there to say of Peters?
Peters makes his money writing, lecturing and speaking. His seminars and platform performances are barnstormers and he has topped the corporate circuit for many years, as other figures have come and gone. He is often accused of pandering to the masses of business managers and leaders who flock to hear him. But two things are undoubtedly true of Peters:
Firstly, he is adept at sniffing the wind
His perception of what is going on in corporate America is acute and he is adept at spotting the trends and building a reasoned case that he communicates in a didactic – sometimes ranting – style
Secondly, he makes people think
His simple style is certainly engaging and his ideas are thought-provoking. Agree with him or not, you can hardly help engaging. And this is what many thousands of executives do, every year. And that makes him influential.
You might also like these blogs:
- Crazy Times again
- Richard Tanner Pascale: The Honda Effect
Tom Peters is a maverick thinker with a provocative style and use of language. We introduced his work in October 2011. However, far earlier in his career, while he was still at international consulting firm McKinsey, he co-developed a tool that rapidly fell into the mainstream.
Like last week's Five Forces Model, the McKinsey 7-S model is provocative in a conservative sort of a way: it can provoke deep insights into your organisation, but is far from revolutionary. It is radical in the true* sense of the work, rather than in the 'way out' sense it has come to adopt.
* Radical, from radix, meaning root. As in radish.
The Origins of the 7-S Model
The 7-S model was created by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (and, I am sure I read once, somewhere, another colleague, un-credited in the book) and was published widely in their business best-seller, 'In Search Of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies'. The authors do credit Anthony Athos and Richard Pascale for their help in developing the model.
They acknowledge its 'obviousness' but rightly, I think, assert its great utility. In last week's Pocketblog, I suggested that Porter's Five Forces Model needed an additional element to account for the forces within a business. I think this is a great model for that purpose. It also serves very well for non-profit organisations in the public and charitable sectors.
The Seven Ss
Okay, the authors also recognise that, at times, they needed a shoe horn to force the model into Seven Ss, rather than, say 4 Ss and a few other letters. But it works very well, and the alliterative nature makes it memorable and therefore more useful.
The fundamental tenet of the model is that, for an organisation to succeed, it must bring seven dimensions into good alignment. Gaps and mis-alignments will be sources of failure or, at least, internal tensions and therefore performance challenges. Let's illustrate this with an admired company.
Shared Values
At the heart of the model is the need for shared values. Apple's whole business is aligned around the values of design and user experience.
Style
Led by Steve Jobs, the business had a style that combined ruthless attention to detail, with an entrepreneurial flair that encouraged ideas. People have been free to innovate – as long as they met Jobs' exacting standards.
Staff
Consequently, Apple is able to attract the very best staff, and is very demanding of them.
Skills
Staff come with passion and a lot of skills, but Apple invests massively to keep staff at the peak of product knowledge and technical excellence.
Structure
I can only speculate about the business structure, but I would expect it to echo the style – loose in the sense that alliances and collaborations are promoted in the development arena, but tight around the operational details, like supply chain and retail.
Systems
Apple's procurement and supply chain systems have become legendary as they have built capacity for launching and supplying huge new market-dominating products.
Strategy
Under Jobs, the strategy was to focus on a small number of products and to make them innovative and excellent – enabling the business to capture a huge market share relative to its size, and build a loyal customer following.
The 7-s model is represented by seven inter-connected circles arranged with six spaced around the seventh (Shared Values) in the centre. This networked 'Atomium-like' image illustrates well, the network nature of these dimensions and their inter-relatedness. There is also a big © symbol attached to it so, notwithstanding the numerous reproductions in derivative books and websites, we'll settle for our alternative representation and a picture of Brussels' Atomium!
The Atomium
by o palsson
Rights granted under Creative Commons Licence
This has been a great year for the Pocketblog, seeing reading figures rise substantially and reaching the milestone of our 100th blog posting.
So, with Christmas coming at the end of the week, let's do a round-up of some personal favourites from among this year's Pocketblogs.
Here is something for each of the twelve days. Enjoy!
1. Start as you mean to go on: Happiness
After some New Year's Resolutions to start the year off, we dived into the subject of Happiness, with ' Happiness – as simple as ABC? ' about Albert Ellis's Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy – the fore-runner of CBT.
2. … and Start Topical
We then moved into a subject that was much in the news in February; and still is. With 'Bankers' Bonuses and Brain Biology' , we looked at recent neuroscience and how that relates to Adams' Equity Theory.
3. Generations
In February too, I wrote two blogs about sociological 'Generations X, Y & Z' and 'Generation Y at work' . I followed this up by another about what comes 'After Generation Y?' .
4. The Gemba
In May, inspiration waned for a week, so where did I go to find it? 'The Gemba' . I got it back, and later that month, got idealistic in 'Reciprocity and Expectation' looking at the Pay it Forward ideal and the realities of Game Theory.
5. Why do we do what we do?
In the first of two blogs on how to predict human behaviour, I looked at 'How to Understand your Toddler' (mine actually) and Icek Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behaviour. Later in the year, in 'Predicting Behaviour' , I looked at whether a simple equation (hypothesised by Kurt Lewin) could predict all behaviour.
6. One of the Best Business Books of the Year
… according to the Journal Strategy & Business is Richard Rumelt's Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: The difference and why it matters. In 'What Makes a Good Business Strategy' we looked at some of his ideas.
7. The Apprentice
This year, I have been a big fan of both series and have written my own episode by episode analysis of both The Apprentice and Young Apprentice. I also did one blog on each for Pocketblog: 'The Apprentice and Five Levels of Leadership' and, for Young Apprentice, 'Decision Failure' .
8. Drucker Triptych
Has any one individual been as influential in establishing management as a pragmatic academic discipline as Peter Drucker? To recognise his various achievements, I wrote a triptych of blogs over the summer:
- The Man who Invented Management
- Management by Objectives
- R.I.P. Corporate Clone: Arise Insightful Executive
And one of Drucker's direct contemporaries was W Edwards Deming, so I also took a look at 'Demings' System of Profound Knowledge' .
9. Crazy Times
Will history look on Tom Peters with the respect that it holds for Drucker and Deming? Who knows? But without a doubt, Peters has been influential, insightful and provocative for thirty years or more, and I am sure many of his ideas will survive. In 'Crazy Times Again' , I drew a line from FW Taylor (father of 'Scientific Management') to Peters.
10. The Circle Chart
In 'Going Round in Circles' I returned to management models and one of my all time favourites: Fisher and Ury's Circle Chart. I applied it to problem solving rather than, as they did, to negotiation.
Fisher and Ury are experts on conflict resolution, as is Morton Deutsch. In 'Conflict: As simple as AEIOU' , I looked at a fabulously simple conflict resolution model that originated in Deutsch's International Centre for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution.
11. Two Notable Events
Two notable events made the autumn memorable for Pocketblog: one sad and one happy.
- In 'A Bigger Bite' we marked Steve Jobs' passing
- With 'Three ways to get it wrong' , we marked our hundredth blog, by looking at one of the towering social psychologists of today, Daniel Kahneman
12. And finally, our most popular topic
Tuckman's model for group formation has proved to be our most popular topic by far this year. We have returned to it three times, each time looking at a particular facet:
- 'Swift Trust: Why some teams don't Storm'
- 'Team Performance Beyond Tuckman'
- 'Tuckman Plus' is the first of two posts. It is the last topic post of 2011 and its companion ( 'Part 2: Transforming' ) will be the first of 2012
So here's the deal
- Have a very merry and peaceful Christmas.
- Have a very happy and healthy New Year.
- Be good, have fun, stay safe, and prosper.
From all at Management Pocketbooks,
our colleagues at Teacher's Pocketbooks too,
and from me particularly.
Mike
Frederick Winslow Taylor was the first management thinker to try to analyse an organisation, test his ideas with experiments, and document the results.
Today we recognise him as the father of 'Scientific Management', a term coined by lawyer Louis Brandeis and used by Taylor in the title of his book, 'The Principles of Scientific Management'.
Taylor became famous for one experiment – and at the same time, invented the 'piece rate' – payment per item made or task completed.
Midvale Steel Works
Taylor was working at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia when he realised that factory processes could be optimised from the fairly random state he found them in. If he could find the 'best' way to fulfil a task, he could maximise efficiency.
The first problem he directed his attention to was the cutting of steel. At the Midvale Steel Works, Taylor tried out a whole range of experiments to find the best way to cut steel, and to shovel coal. Later, at the Bethlehem Iron Works, he took up the challenge to increase the amount of 32 inch iron bars a man could shift in a day. He measured the rate of work before starting his experiments at 13 tons per day. As well as suggesting alternative methods, Taylor offered 'piece rates' to the men.
The Victory of Incentives
One worker, called Henry Noll, was particularly motivated by incremental payment, because he was also building a house. Noll shifted an astonishing 47 tons of iron a day. As a result, he got to take home 60% more in his wages: $1.85 compared to $1.15 which his fellow workers got.
The Story Shifted
Of course, Scientific Management was not the last word, and researchers like Elton Mayo – who set out to provide further evidence for Taylor's theories – were to counter it powerfully with a radical alternative: 'Democratic Management'.
'The change which you and your associates are working to effect will not be mechanical but humane.'
Elton Mayo
And now we are in Crazy Times… again
One modern management thinker has done more to rail against Scientific Management than any other. And he does so with a charisma and a showmanship that eclipses any of his peers. Love him or hate him (and many do each), it is hard to ignore the influence of Tom Peters.
Tom Peters has come to speak and write in demotic, didactic, explosive language that makes it hard for some to take him seriously. Academic and dry, he is not. So many criticise what appears to be his flippancy and glibness. However, he has been way ahead on just about every management and organisational trend in my lifetime. [21 years? Ed]
Tom Peters is capable of solid research and a more dusty style, and has written much in that format, but his more recent works have adopted a distinct style of challenging his readers and audience to think. He will stretch your concepts beyond breaking point and hope that, when you mend them, they have given up a measure of slack.
One of his most astonishing seminars and books was Crazy Times call for Crazy Organisations – in the mid 1990s.
Well, things are going crazy again folks. Time to dust off some Tom Peters, and challenge today's orthodoxy, if you want to stay ahead for tomorrow. Here's some classic Peters…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UyvJgOCS1w]
Source: https://www.pocketbook.co.uk/blog/tag/tom-peters/
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