Frederick Winslow Taylor

You have to rely on foundational management theories.

And the textbook leans heavily on two pioneers here, F.W. Taylor and Henry Fayol.

And they approach management from like completely opposite ends of the telescope.

Oh, completely.

Taylor is all about scientific management.

His philosophy was born in the dirt and the noise of the factory floor.

From the bottom up.

He wanted to replace rule of thumb guesswork with rigorous science.

Break that down for me.

So this is from Frederick Winslow Taylor.

He was a mechanical engineer, and he published his scientific management theory in 1895.

Taylor is the guy who literally brought a stopwatch to the factory floor.

It was written by Sarah O'Connor.

And it's an article where she described that somewhere in the early 20th century, there was a guy called Frederick Taylor.

I don't know if that rings a bell, but Frederick Taylor.

He was tasked by extracting knowledge from inside the heads of workers on American factory floors.

And what he did at the time is that he put a team together and he gave them stopwatches and notebooks.

I think one of the things that we have gone back to, like fundamentals, is what work serves for humans.

And I think if we go back to like Adam Smith and Frederick Taylor and the Wayback Machine, 20s of 1920s, we know that it was much more a transactional exchange for remuneration.

It was like this very much like I give my effort, you give me compensation, I'm on my way.

But over the course of at least only the past hundred years, we've expanded what it means to work.

Hi, welcome to Notions of Progress, the show that traces ideas of progress from antiquity to the age of AI.

In part two, Professor Gavin Mueller traced a through line from Marx's own ambivalence about machinery through the split between orthodox and heterodox strands of Marxism, to Frederick Taylor's theory of workplace control, the technocracy movement's apocalyptic vision of automation, And Norbert Wiener's attempt as one of cybernetics founding figures to warn what automation would mean for their power.

In this final part, Professor Mueller brings that history into the present.

The conversation then moves from Shoshana Zuboff's early research of computerized factory floors to her later work on surveillance capitalism, and from there into Professor Mueller's own reading of artificial intelligence, training data, cognitive offloading, and what he sees as Luddism's real legacy.

And that is the legacy of the Industrial Revolution.

We inherited this mental model from early scientific management, from figures like Frederick Winslow Taylor.

The organization was strictly divided?

Exactly.

Right.

So for those who know Frederick Winslow Taylor, he's a little more famous.

Yeah, you've heard of him.

She was a contemporary of Taylor.

It's going to take leadership.

It's going to take acknowledgement of the fact that we have to lead with conviction and trust people and not lead to compliance to a legacy system that was created in 1911 by Frederick Taylor.

We cannot any longer work with the silo system and stay with that process.

We just can't do it.

Yeah.

Frederick Taylor's theories of scientific management in the early 20th century.

They were all about maximizing industrial efficiency by treating workers as cogs in a machine, you know, removing their autonomy.

Oh, wow.