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Handoff Waste and Taylorism
- drewcoo 3y agoThe short article praises Ward because the author read Ward's book. Ward was basically teaching Deming, though. The real division is in Deming's response to Taylor.
- hef19898 3y agoSo, the author wrote about a subject without studying beyond one book from one auther he liked a lot? Just more of the 21st century shallow internet then. Edit: And someone who never heard of how Toyota, and basically everyone else, is doing things now to an extent in the hardware world...
- pessimizer 3y ago> I’m creating flashcards from my notes of Ward’s book on product development and it is chock full of wisdom. It's somebody reading a book that most people haven't read, taking notes on it, and allowing the public to read those notes. Calm down.
- hef19898 3y agoSo, instead of discussing the actual research and body of knowledge, we discuss some first semesters "flashcards" one single book? I know it is a meta complaint, but I really would have prefered something with a littel more substance to it.
- civilized 3y agoCould you elaborate? Why is the contrast drawn here not the real division? EDIT: I figured it out. For anyone else who is confused, Allen C. Ward wrote Lean Product and Process Development, and the parent is saying that Ward is simply repackaging what W. E. Deming taught.
- social_ism 3y agoIt's called product owner
- regularfry 3y agoNot sure that's right. There's usually no expectation that a product owner would have "the knowledge to develop it on their own, given enough time".
- 28304283409234 3y agoNope.But there most certainly _should_ be such an expectation.
- regularfry 3y agoI've heard the reverse argument, although I don't agree with it. That it's beneficial to have someone non-technical in that seat so that they're taking the user's viewpoint. The reason I don't agree with it is that a) they are more likely to take a viewpoint influenced by internal politics than that of the user; and b) it's perfectly reasonable to expect to be able to find technically-qualified people who have that level of empathy.
- wslh 3y agoI don’t understand why the author is choosing Taylorism, something from the early XX century instead of talking about much more modern scientific management approaches. It seems like criticizing anything from the past in the context of new approaches. The author is criticizing it like a current problem.
- civilized 3y agoIf the legacy of Taylorism wasn't a persistent issue, the epidemic of Dilbert comics in cubicles wouldn't have happened. Much of Dilbert is about the irrelevance of Taylorism to engineering and product work, and the absurdity and ennui workers endure when their managers are somehow "responsible for product success", but neither know nor are expected to know how the work is supposed to be done.
- wslh 3y agoI would say that we are talking about management science in general when it is applied like a manual. It is typical MBA talk.
- civilitty 3y agoIt's the same reason we still talk about Jung and Freud even though most of their work is considered unscientific nonsense by modern psychology. Taylor was just popular at a crucial junction when the scientific management zeitgeist first started forming. Those middle ages of the industrial revolution created a lot of first movers we still associate with fields that have long since moved on.
- sh34r 3y agoTaylorism is a current problem. All "modern" management pseudoscience boils down to the same ideas Taylor espoused at the turn of the century. His name lives on because this man was absolutely reviled by his contemporaries, even among his own class. He was investigated by Congress in 1912, and they ruled in favor of his striking workers at Watertown Arsenal, banning Taylorism at their workplace. Let that sink in: this man and his dehumanizing practices were so widely hated, Congress ruled in favor of workers in 1912. Today, in 2023, Congress won't even give rail workers a damn sick day. Taylorism was viewed at the time as an affront to the Protestant work ethic, and to God himself, for that matter. Henry Ford was a contemporary of Taylor's, and if you know anything about Ford, well, he wasn't a saint, to put it mildly. And yet, we call these hated ideas "Taylorism" because even Henry Ford wasn't as awful as Taylor. It took another century of disempowering labor in this country to get to this place today, where the worst excesses of Taylorism are everywhere you look, Where delivery contractors are contractors for the world's richest man and are forced to piss in bottles. Where your boss is tracking your every move with spyware, and has bugged your home under the guise of "work from home." We speak of management pseudoscience not as a wicked and depraved ideology now, but as a legitimate field of study, like math or history. What an unbelievable farce. "I already am eating from the trash can all the time. The name of this trash can is ideology. The material force of ideology makes me not see what I am effectively eating." -Zizek
- Groxx 3y agoSo the solution to waste is... to hire a unicorn, and then make them do a substantial portion of everything, including find, train, and manage others? Erm. Sure, good luck with that. I'll grant that it's possible, but it's not likely repeatable or predictable. You either already have it or you'll be relying on luck to find it. And then likely cause burnout.
- jackphilson 3y agoWell, they're not doing every job, just making sure that everyone is doing every job correctly according to their vision.