Beware of Lean Hypocrisy

In defense of Frederick Winslow Taylor

Every day, thousands of people confuse lean management with “Taylorism,” properly known as scientific management. The negative association brings out the lean bigwigs and others who work hard to create a great separation between lean and Frederick Winslow Taylor. This is an ill-informed and inappropriate response. It is also an irresponsible response because it misleads people.

Leaders of the lean movement, in particular, shouldn’t mislead people through their own prejudice and ignorance. And those who speak loudest about “respect for people” are quick to shower Taylor with disrespect and other forms of disdain and mistreatment.

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Comments

Interesting read.

Thanks!

Taylorism the difference between Deming & Lean?

I would agree that Frederick Taylor was a rock star in his time. Scientific Management allowed for advancements during the industrial revolution. I can't dispute this. However, it had its issues - this is well-documented in the book, "Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal."

At Watertown, Taylor displayed great mistrust of the worker. He viewed workers as lazy and needing incentives to be a good worker, This couldn't be more opposite to Deming and the use of intrinsic motivation and believing that workers are motivated in a well-designed system.

Dr. Perry Gluckman - who studied with Dr. Deming - pointed out that Taylorism type thinking was what was holding back management thinking today. His work with HP and IBM led to Ken Delavigne and Dan Robertson writing a book on this very subject, "Deming's Profound Changes." This book outlines the Tayloristic and Neo-Tayloristic thinking that Deming railed against. Some of these are:

- Management Control

- Belief in Optimal Processes

- Narrow view of the cause of defects: People

- Functional Separation of Work

Scientific Management (Taylor) and Scientific Method (Deming and many others) are different. It is a stretch to say that Taylor used Scientifc Method. This didn't come until much later with Shewhart, Einstein, Planck, CI Lewis, Poincare and Bridgman.

If the view is that Lean is steeped in Tayloristic thinking, we can conclude that Lean is different from Deming.

Real Lean vs. Fake Lean

Lean (Toyota Production System) is not Tayloristic. Toyota learned from Dr. Deming and took it to heart and practice.

What Bob calls "Fake Lean" is a Neo-Tayloristic bastardization of Lean. The authors of the NEJM article are complaining about Taylorism, not Lean.

NEJM Article, Deming and Improvement methods

The NEJM article was not referenced, however, here is the link http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1512402. I think it is important to consider the further we get from Deming with TPS and then "lean" the message is lost. I consider "lean" to be a copy of a copy - we are not in need of a new philosophy unless it is a breakthrough.

The basic tenets of the Deming Management Method (SoPK and 14 points) are still the place to start. Had these folks (Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D) started with Deming they would have had more clarity. We need to begin to question who exactly are the "fake" practitioners. I would say we might want to start with those that copy others success.