The history of management consulting : The New Yorker
Not So Fast
THE CHAIRMAN: Scientific management has no place for such men?MR. TAYLOR: Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing. . . .THE CHAIRMAN: We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds, but we are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.Taylor knew that he had performed badly. Asked to proof the transcript of his testimony, he ordered a lackey to steal Wilson’s copy of “The Principles of Scientific Management.” Taylor had the idea that he could lift passages from his book and dump them into his testimony—replacing what he had actually said, under oath—but then he worried that the switch would be too risky if Wilson had the chance to compare the transcript with the book. He didn’t get away with it. Speedy Taylor had met his match. The next year, the President appointed William Bauchop Wilson the Secretary of Labor. But, by then, Taylorism had permeated the culture. So had therbligs: Life published a cartoon about the fifteen unnecessary motions of a kiss.About half of “The Management Myth” is an exposé of management consulting (the emperor has no clothes); the rest is Stewart’s exploration of his erstwhile profession’s checkered past (the emperor never did), although the kind of business book people have been buying for, oh, the past half century is instruction (you, too, can be an emperor!). Tom Peters’s “In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies” is in its gazillionth printing. Still, if the economy takes another turn for the worse there’s surely money to be made selling books that decry the making of money. Frederick Winslow Taylor makes a great villain, but Stewart needs him to be ridiculous, which makes it difficult to appreciate Brandeis’s argument: there was waste, there were inefficiencies, and Taylorizing did improve the standard of living, at least as measured by consumption. Whatever has happened since, Ford Motor Company did once pay its workers well, build good cars fast, and sell them cheap to people who, suddenly, could afford them.Much of Stewart’s account is devoted to following the anti-Taylor and neo-Taylor theories that have determined the curriculum at business schools in the course of the past century. He pays special attention to human-factors science and follows through several chapters the work of Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, whose early books “Competitive Strategy” (1980) and “Competitive Advantage” (1985) launched a field known as strategic management. (I should perhaps mention that, in the late eighties, Porter was my boss. His phone rang off the hook, and I, a temporary secretary, had the job of answering it.) To Stewart, strategic management is scientific management, without the stopwatch. And, along with much else taught in business schools, and everything that goes on in management-consulting firms, “it contributes to a misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity.”“Still, you’ve got to applaud the transparency.”Business schools have been indicted before. Earning an M.B.A. has been found to have little correlation with later business success. Business isn’t a science, critics say; it’s a set of skills, best learned on the job. Some business schools, accused of teaching nothing so much as greed, now offer ethics courses. Stewart argues that this whole conversation, about people, production, wealth, and virtue, is a conversation about ethics, and is better had within a liberal-arts curriculum. His howl of frustration, after all those years spent living in hotels, peddling nonsense, and profiting by it, is loud and angry. It’s also only half the story.Scientific management didn’t just change businesses and business schools. Speeding up production meant that workers came home knackered. Some Bethlehem ironworkers were so wrecked after a Taylor-size day’s work that they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. In 1914, Henry Ford announced a five-dollar, eight-hour workday—generous terms, at the start—but, after that, salaries froze even as the speed of production increased, and, meanwhile, Ford kept reducing his workforce. Edmund Wilson, in “American Jitters,” later quoted a Ford worker saying, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.” Brandeis hoped that this autoworker might spend his evening at a lecture or a political rally, but, more likely, he went home and collapsed on the couch while his wife, who, quite possibly, had put in eight hours at Ford, too, made dinner and got the children ready for bed—efficiently! For lots of people, particularly the growing number of working women, speeding up at work, which you might think would mean slowing down at home, enjoying that promised land of leisure, meant just the opposite: home got sped up, too. No one knew that better than Frank Gilbreth’s wife, who had a lot to say on the subject of exhaustion, and who understood, better than Taylor and Brandeis did, that scientific management isn’t the kind of thing you can leave at the office.Lillian Gilbreth was pregnant with her fifth child when she attended that meeting with Brandeis in New York, in October of 1910. Taylor taught efficiency; Brandeis championed it; Gilbreth lived it. Born in Oakland in 1878, she graduated from the University of California in 1900 and married Frank Gilbreth four years later. They agreed to have twelve children, six boys and six girls, and to raise them by the most scientific methods, as Jane Lancaster relates in a 2004 biography, “Making Time.” In an era of rapidly shrinking family size, the Gilbreths’ household, a laboratory of efficiency, would show the world what economies of scale were all about. Between 1905 and 1922, Lillian gave birth thirteen times, at fifteen-month intervals; one child died, at the age of five, of diphtheria. She breast-fed every baby. The wonderful zaniness of the Gilbreths’ family life was recorded by two of their children in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” published in 1948. The Gilbreths held weekly Family Council meetings. Once, one of the boys made a motion to get a puppy. Seconded, and opened for discussion: “He could eat scraps of food,” another of the boys piped up. “He would save us waste and would save motions for the garbage man.” Called to a vote: ten in favor, one abstention (Lillian), and one opposed (Frank). They named the dog Mr. Chairman. In 1950, the book was made into a film starring Myrna Loy as Boss, which is what Frank called his wife. Lillian disliked and was embarrassed by both the book and the film, not least because they ignore the fact that, during those years, she ran a business, became the first pioneer of scientific management to earn a doctorate, and wrote many books.Admittedly, it’s hard to see past all those pregnancies. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, William Randolph Hearst offered a hundred dollars to anyone who had a baby in his emergency hospital. Frank, who was in the city courting building contracts, wrote to his wife, ribbing her, “I think there is a chance for you if you hurry.” He named their summer place the Shoe, after the woman with too many children, who lived in one, and didn’t know what to do. Once, when he told a colleague, “Lillie always feels better when she is pregnant,” the other guy shot back, “How the hell can she tell?”Frank considered postpartum bed rest to be wasted time (“Dear Boss,” he wrote, “MOTION IS MONEY”), so Lillian used the weeks after childbirth to edit her husband’s books, most of which she also co-wrote, or, as several scholars believe, wrote entirely, even when her name didn’t appear on the title page. (Lillian’s prose is distinctively “gabby,” as Frank put it.) In 1911, she edited “Motion Study,” after giving birth to Frank, Jr., and it was likely Lillian, not her husband, who wrote “The Primer of Scientific Management.” The following year, the Gilbreths moved to Rhode Island so that Lillian could enroll in a Ph.D. program at Brown, where she studied psychology, something that she thought was missing from Taylorism. In Providence, the Gilbreths lived so close to campus, Frank joked, that Lillian “could go to class and if a child fell out of the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”Meanwhile, Taylorized workers kept complaining about being bone-tired. In 1911, molders at an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, refused to work under the eye of a timekeeper. Pouring a mold and making a gun carriage usually took fifty-three minutes; Taylor’s timekeeper told the molders to do it in twenty-four. During an investigation into the ensuing strike, it came out that Taylor had told his timekeeper not to bother too much with the stopwatch—better simply to make “a rough guess.” In a petition to their boss, the molders wrote, “This we believe to be the limit of our endurance. It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American.”Taylor, plagued by controversy, grew ill. He sometimes sent Frank Gilbreth to deliver lectures in his place. Increasingly, though, the Gilbreths had misgivings about Taylorism. In 1913, when Frank was substituting for Taylor in Chicago, Lillian went along, with a three-month-old nursling. Onstage, Frank was challenged by Emma Goldman. He was pointing to a chart illustrating the hierarchical relationship between the foreman and the worker. “There is nothing in scientific management for the workman,” Goldman shouted. “The only scheme is to have the workman support the loafers on top of him.” Lillian leaned over and whispered something to Frank, who cheerfully turned the chart upside down. That was just a stunt, of course, but Lillian had an argument to make, which she put forward in “The Psychology of Management,” published in 1914: “The emphasis in successful management lies on the man, not on the work.” And maybe even on the women and children, too.Gilbreth defended her dissertation in June, 1915. Three months later, she fell down a flight of stairs, went into labor, and gave birth to a stillborn baby. Taylor had died earlier that year. After reading in a fawning biography how much Taylor loved the workers, Frank Gilbreth scrawled in the margin, “But none came to his funeral, nor to his memorial service.” Brandeis was there, though, and delivered a speech that was later printed in Harper’s under the title “Efficiency by Consent.” Brandeis’s considered ideas about management were actually far closer to the Gilbreths’ than to Taylor’s. Taylor thought that men were mules. Brandeis advocated industrial democracy: workers must have a voice in how a business is run. The Gilbreths favored putting a suggestion box in the workplace. Taylor took nothing from the Watertown Arsenal strike except that it might be better “not to try to hurry task work too fast.” Brandeis insisted that, if workers were to enjoy sufficient leisure to participate in a democratic society, productivity had to be increased, but he also worried that, without unions, workers would be pushed past the limits of human endurance. That’s why unions, he believed, ought to consent to efficiency. Gilbreth, Inc., made a policy of requiring contracts to be signed by both shop bosses and representatives from organized labor.The year after Taylor died, Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court. It was one of the most controversial nominations in the Court’s history. The reason for the controversy, Brandeis observed, was that he “is considered a radical and is a Jew.” Much of the opposition had to do with his support of unions. One member of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “The real crime of which this man is guilty is that he has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system. He has not stood in awe of the majesty of wealth.” The president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated a petition opposing Brandeis’s nomination, but, when Lowell’s predecessor, Charles Eliot, sent a letter of support, Brandeis’s law partner boasted, “Next to a letter from God, we have got the best.” Brandeis took a seat on the Court in June, 1916.That year, Lillian Gilbreth checked the galleys of a book called “Fatigue Study” while recovering from the birth of her ninth child. Taylor had studied fatigue, too, but Gilbreth had a different kind of knowledge of what it meant to be at the limits of physical endurance. She also shared Brandeis’s view that profit wasn’t everything. The whole point of efficiency, she said, was to maximize “happiness minutes.” Happiness minutes? For Lillian Gilbreth, scientific management wasn’t just a business practice; it was a habit of mind and a way of life.In 1918, she was invited to lecture about motion and fatigue at M.I.T. She must have been practicing the presentation at home. One night, the children invited her to play a game of charades. “What do you think the first one was?” she wrote to Frank. “Well, it was ‘Fatigue Survey.’ How is that for breathing it in?” On the day of the lecture, she got five children ready for school, nursed her four-month-old, handed the two toddlers over to the housekeeper, and caught a ten-o’clock train. In Cambridge, she talked for twenty minutes and showed thirty-six slides (reporting to Frank that she tried very hard to talk like a scientist, and “not like a Lady”), but, when asked to stay late, she told her host that she had eight children to get home to. (“That seemed to interest him a lot.”) She made it back to Providence for the 6:30 P.M. nursing.