Scientific Management Quotes

“There was nothing scientific about Scientific Management (Taylorism), and neither was it good management.”
― Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organizational Change: How Leaders Set Strategy, Change Behavior, and Create an Agile Culture

“The point was made many times that scientific management benefitted workers not at all, perhaps most clearly by a short statement by John P. Frey, editor of the International Molders Journal and participant in a bipartisan survey of the claims of scientific management,

'If generally applied the craftsmen would pass out of existence, and the workers would become dependent for their existence upon the scanty and insignificant industrial knowledge and experience afforded them by their limited opportunities, regulated by those who in addition to their ownership of machinery, had also acquired possession of craft knowledge and the skilled workers’ methods.”
― Donald Stabile, Prophets of Order: The Rise of the New Class, Technocracy and Socialism in America

“In economy, cash is king. But it will be a great king if it is in the hands of the people who can change the world.”
― Marionito Marquez, The One Best Way to manage a business according to science

“Move beyond the traditional goal, habit, and strengths-management hysteria. Goals, habits and strengths are means, not ends. Don't turn means into ends unto themselves.”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“The system wants to own your day until the day you die.”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“The system wants to own your day until the day you die (or are not useful to the value network anymore—whichever comes first).”
― Richie Norton, Anti-Time Management: Reclaim Your Time and Revolutionize Your Results with the Power of Time Tipping

“The “ideology of Taylorism all but ensured a workplace divided against itself, both in space and in practice, with a group of managers controlling how work was done and their workers merely performing that work,” he writes. “It became increasingly clear . . . from the distance between the top and the bottom rungs of the ‘ladder,’ that some workers were never going to join the upper layers of management. For some, work was always, frankly, going to suck.”
― Nikil Saval

“Scientific management, so-called, is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions reflect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regard to the conditions of production. It starts, despite occasional protestations to the contrary, not from the human point of view but from the capitalist point of view, from the point of view of the management of a refractory work force in a setting of antagonistic social relations. It does not attempt to discover and confront the cause of this condition, but accepts it as an inexorable given, a “natural” condition. It investigates not labor in general, but the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital.”
― Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century