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abandoned it politically. The matter is no different when it comes to top management reserving the right to prescribe the sole path and suppressing dissent (and if baby innovation gets flushed with the questioning bathwater, so be it!). Just as obedience to the authority provided fertile soil for military ways to flourish in traditional business organizations, belief in the chosen way was rich manure for the Scientific Management movement. Frederick Winslow Taylor did not intend to create a movement that would be inimical to questioning and grass-root innovation but the way his 'scientific design of tasks' was taken forward in industry after industry and country after country, it clearly had a chilling effect on workmen thinking for themselves and expressing disagreement when they wanted to. ."[T]he right person for most of the non-managerial jobs Taylor designed was someone with limited imagination, boundless patience and a willingness to do the same repetitive tasks day in and day out."16 A perfect descriptor of Chaplin’s 'Modern Times' – or countless call center, mass production and delivery jobs in India today! Though not derived directly from Taylor, Alfred Krupp exemplified this zeitgeist in Germany when he wrote the General Regulations for his employ| July 2021
There are many glimpses of history that we could use to illuminate why we organize business enterprises the way we do even though our reliance on outmoded mental models and methods cost us dearly ees with the intent that "no case should occur for many years, for a century, which has not been foreseen in this compilation."17 Once again, it’s not as if Taylor had no critics as soon as his task dissection and prescription method started racing across the US and then the rest of the world. Harrington Emerson, to name just one, believed "… that standards should never be cast in stone: they should alter as circumstances dictate, as new technology becomes available or as workplace conditions change... Standards are there for
guidance, not as challenges or methods of compulsion."17 Understandably, the criticism expressed by Samuel Gompers, the founder of the American Federation of Labour, was even more barbed. He felt Taylorism robbed workers of meaning and satisfaction in their work and "transformed them into … 'high speed automatic machines' that were … 'a cog or a nut or a pin in a big machine' " 17 Unfortunately, the Taylorism tide was far too strong for these wavelets of opposition. Matters reached such a pass that when innovation had to be genuinely
