 In perspective for this seventh lesson, we start with an understanding of two very different approaches to civilization. The one grew out of military and government, and was arranged to assure structure and order to society and public activities. It was quite effective in smaller applications where the public served was most local, holding the authorized leadership to account for public activities. It even worked in much larger efforts under the feudal concept, where the lower-level privileged leaders had to live among the common people of the feud. The impersonal nature of larger authority-based structures also worked extremely well in the military. That was where activities in a dangerous environment required a high level of coordination and cooperation among masses of people. It has not been the method of choice for organizing family efforts, especially in a nuclear family, a more intimate sharing of purpose seems to promote a much higher level of performance, and it appears to be well accepted by people in general. Still, authority structure has been effectively applied in the Muslim community, with greater tendency to recognize effective privilege in a family leader. Before the Industrial Revolution, farmers worked their land using horses, powerful animals, to pull a plow or rake. They used horses and a wagon to bring in the harvest and deliver it where it was to go. As a matter of common sense, the farmer did not beat his horses to make them work. It was not a matter of getting these recelstered animals to bend to the will of the farmer, but of recognizing their willingness to work with the farmer and under his general direction. He did not withhold his care from the horse until it proved its worth by its efforts, rather the well-fed and well-tended horse was a good working companion. It might need a sting from the switch to get its attention to the task at hand, but the horse was not working to some different purpose than the farmers. The farmer worked together with the horse, also seeing to the same basic effort, even if it was through direction rather than physical labor. Somehow, this did not seem to translate into how businesses dealt with the hired workforce. The chaos of the industrial revolution led to having workers under contract, and it was the duty of the hired bosses to set these workers to their tasks for the good of the business that hired both, and that was what they did. The purpose was not just profit. The purpose was getting the most work from the workers for what the business had to pay them. As businesses grew and as they shifted more and more to corporate leadership, the leadership shifted farther and farther away from sharing any purpose with these hired workers. The idea of working together was all but abandoned. It was workers working for the leadership. It was workers paid to do the work, and bosses paid to set them to it. Horse sense was all but gone. It was bargains, us and them deals, where each party was seeing to their own side of their employment contracts. What the worker got was pay. That was all the leadership really owed to them. What the business got was time and effort for business direction. That was all the workers really owed to business. And each worker had his or her own contract. His or her own responsibilities to the business that bought the workers time and effort. Each worker was a unit of production paid to give time and attention to tasks set by business direction. Loyalty? Just where did that come into this situation? If workers didn't give business the full measure of time and effort, all they seemed to have, they could be replaced by others who would. If the business started to scrimp on pay, the workers would find somewhere else to sell their time and effort. If there was sharing, it was by persons involved and not supported by either workers or businesses that hired them. This encouraged an environment ruled by us and them considerations. The boss's job was to get the most possible work from the workers who the business employed. Any workers who seemed to slack off would be fired and replaced. It was the whip. It was like beating your horses to keep them to task. There was no extra pay for the worker who accomplished more. There would likely be a problem with other workers who didn't get anything extra for competing with the one who was more productive. They were paid to work, to accept direction, not to actually achieve results. The chaos created by the loss of family leadership was answered by the imposed structure and by establishing a new concept of privilege. It might not have yielded great results, but did provide a well-structured and very stable corporate system of business. This was the working environment Frederick Taylor addressed. He was educated as an engineer and saw potentials that were not being realized. There was internal contention between the purpose given to workers and the purpose given to the boss. He had been promoted to be a boss in the machine shop area, but decided to extend his efforts beyond what was required of a boss. He assumed a purpose in being productive and gaining results, and he was so bold as to insist that his purpose was also the purpose of the workers who answered to his direction. The very isolation maintained by leadership supported his experimentation with this, and he upset his own workers, giving them direction in how to do their jobs that they were hired to do. It is likely that his employment as one of them helped to keep him from open revolution. It was also his obvious respect for his workers. It was that he was not beating his horses to get them to work harder. They actually worked less. They went home at the end of the day less exhausted than they had by simply being bossed. He was, in that sense, supporting them. It was somewhat surprising that Taylor was not fired, but then again his group was rather quickly demonstrating a remarkable increase in what the machinists were accomplishing. It wasn't just work. Taylor was an engineer and studied how much metal cutting would be needed to do a process, how big a metal chip should be for optimum cutting. He adjusted the machines to accomplish optimum cutting and performance, took an upward leap. The worker who carried each piece of finished work to the next station might find a basket to collect his finished work, so he only walked to the next station after ten to fifty completed pieces. It was the operation of the machine tools that was minimized for gaining results. It was the time and effort of the worker that was minimized in doing work. These are what Taylor's efforts were eliminating. It was eliminating what we have come to call waste. Efforts and actions were not necessary or effective in gaining the desired performance results. It was time and effort of workers that was being expended that did not add to what workers achieved. Could it really be that simple? No, it was not simple. It was open defiance of the way we do things. It was culture shock. It was a challenge to employment as it was practiced. It was a challenge to the very purpose of supervision by a boss. It was interfering with the work of employees. It was an insult to their expertise. It was also horse sense, the intrusion of performance thinking. It was honoring what was accomplished instead of what people did to accomplish it. That was foreign and a bit insulting. But then it raised a new conflict by being of benefit to everyone. The workers got more done. Their value to the business increased. And they were achieving things that they had never been doing before. The business enjoyed the increase in production, greater profits. But it was change and privileged systems are rightfully valued for their stability, not for their advancements. Having workers become more valuable to the business was an assault on the value of leadership, even if they were able to reward themselves more handsomely. What about the bosses, skilled employees that had been set into authority over workers? They had been the working arm of privileged management and they were rapidly being replaced by foremen. For us, there are two principles to consider. The first is the potency of identifying and eliminating unnecessary unproductive efforts. This yields very good results. The second is in relation to other people continuing to do what has worked for them in the past. There is always going to be resistance to change. And even obvious improvements will be challenged as failing to honor what we have learned to do or to honor how we have always done things. It will be treated as an unwanted interference in what others would do. A more modern understanding of this area of effort is eliminating waste. While Taylor had not developed it to this extent, we have two general areas of waste. We have productive input waste and productive output waste, often identified as type one and type two. Consider a policy that requires a general medical evaluation of everyone who enters a hospital, checking their weight, their height, and their age and the like. An ambulance delivers a person injured in an auto accident who is actively bleeding from several wounds. Preventing the treatment of that patient until the vitals are recorded would be type one waste. Medical personnel know this, and you do not worry about such things when the life of the patient may depend on rapid medical treatment. Type one waste can be institutionalized and become part of an industry. Consider buying an automobile and having to wait for dealer prep before they will let you take it. Just what is the manufacturer selling to the dealer? Type two waste is delivery of productive output to non-customers, or delivery of something to customers that they do not get to value as part of the sale. Consider that a corporate leadership decides to donate funds to a political candidate who seems most likely to support business. The challenge is, when you as a part owner of the business are actively supporting another candidate, you get the business leaders who challenge your purpose by using what you ultimately own. That is type two waste. There is no loss to you if the leadership is prevented from that activity. There are many products that are only sold with a specific written warranty. The purpose is not to warrant the product, but to limit normal product warranties. The automatic warranty of fitness for use that will otherwise apply to the product. The written warranty can be eliminated without loss to the customer. Again, this waste can be institutionalized, made a part of the way we do business. There would be considerable resistance to any changes that would eliminate that waste. Consider the change from smoke generating railroad steam engines to diesel electric. The union was able to insist that personnel who had stoked the fire of the steam engines had to be employed on the new engines as well. Our purpose is to recognize that waste for what it is and consider whether it is of such consequences as would justify the action to remove it. As another waste concept, we have the result of process improvement. This is where time and effort and possibly other resources are expended to improve a work process. Once that improvement is set in place, there is ownership in the improvement. It is not focused on the product, but on what is done. If there still was wasted efforts, they would have been improved as well, even though they still be waste. Having already gone through an improvement process, that waste has been effectively approved. An investment has been made. Those using that improved process will resist further improvement efforts. And even more on point, people will mount an even greater resistance to elimination of improved processes. Our hero finds an abandoned vehicle in the woods. It's rusty, but there is some feeling that it might be recovered and given new life. His first action will not be to go out and buy new tires. Our performance principle is a simple one. It makes no sense to improve something unless it works. Our hero would not have the old rusty heap haul to the shop to have a portable water fountain installed for the comfort of passengers. This is not a complicated principle. It seems to be just common sense when properly presented. The challenge is what we have addressed as privilege of ownership. It is an element of human nature that effectively adds value to what is owned, even if it has no intrinsic value. Our challenge is improving the conditions of employment as a way to address organizational management. It is building that culture of the business so that workers have increased loyalty to their employers and are willing to provide the benefit of their longer working experience to that employer to the benefit of the company. In a sense, it is a question of how we give workers a sense of ownership that will increase how they value their employment. In the modern leadership mode, this is seen as a potent direction for development, a good cause of action. When addressed in terms of performance, we ask those challenging questions of the value to be achieved. And it immediately takes on a different color. Is this to be a new goal? What is the objective? Is there a difference between success and failure in the effort such that management can accomplish that success? And then, it's still deeper challenge. If management succeeds in this effort, what will be accomplished that has value? I was supervisor in a federal employee group when the senior level decision was made to promote inclusiveness in the workplace and noted that refusing to deal with those with AIDS, the autoimmune deficiency syndrome, was a social challenge in the government-managed workplace. We were accordingly called in for training, as presented by a contractor and given the message that AIDS was a syndrome, a set of symptoms. And we were not to let ourselves be led to treat those people as different. AIDS was not contagious. It included the admonition that this was to be recognized as a social problem, that we are to be careful not to advertise that those with AIDS had this challenge, but were to have them work right alongside the others. And so you have administrative leadership's opinion of workers set before you. Indeed, AIDS is not contagious. It is a virus that causes AIDS that is contagious. It was instruction that we were to meet their inclusiveness goal by putting our workers in threat and then carefully avoid telling them that we had introduced an unnecessary risk into their workplace. That effort quickly died away. No supervisor who cares about his people would have acted on such a direction. Were these leaders trying to improve the culture of the workplace? Not only did the goal seem counter to performance-oriented culture, it was counter to performance management. In performance terms, inclusiveness in the workplace did not contribute to worker performance nor to work group performance. Improving inclusiveness had no value. It was waste. In this case, the cost would have been quite high. While this was obviously extreme, it has become commonly institutionalized that work supervisors receive social training to keep them from offending their own workers. It is common for workers to receive social training to keep them from making their working environment hostile to some easily offended minority group. All this is cost. Not only is it a cost to provide the training and a cost paid in time where the workers get no work done, but it is an indirect cost. It is type one waste when you put requirements on those who work that has no contribution to what they are able to accomplishment. This, as I am sure you see, is not a great cost in itself. The time and effort involved is hardly significant. The challenges at this regulatory cost has become common. That little bit of regulation at the time can add up to a considerable cost in what the worker has to do to stay employed. It is cost in threat of being released from employment. If someone takes offense at something that has nothing to do with work or with the value of the employee to the performance of the organization, they still can be fired. And even more on point for our discussion, putting this cost on workers is seen as the right and proper action for senior leadership. Not only do they seek out opportunities to continue improving things, but will dismiss any attempt to challenge the improvements that have already been put in place. Administration always favors stability. In the mid to later 1800s, the worker was treated as the unit of performance. The worker was under contract and effectively indentured for hours of the time to submit to business direction. That was how to earn monetary compensation. Workers were hired as performance units and expected to provide themselves ready to work for the purpose of their hiring. This originally meant that they were hired along with common tools they used in performing the work. A carpenter would not be hired unless he came with hammer and saw and a draw knife and chisels. And it was their job to keep their tools ready for use. We read in Taylor's work on scientific management that he had a work crew that was loading bulk materials like coal and iron ore, but were using their own shovels. A small shovel picked up for a little weight in coal and a large shovel full of iron ore was so heavy it was hard to lift. He went out and bought shovels appropriate to the size and density of the materials. And that ability to shovel with these new shovels was remarkably increased. Again, it was horse sets. You do not need a team of Dre horses to pull a light buggy. Nor would you expect a single horse to pull a large wagon full of sugar beets up a hill. The fact that you could direct the horses as you saw fit did not make it smart to exhaust your animals. But then we look at what Taylor accomplished and the size of the work crew was reduced considerably because the work could be done by fewer employees. Was Taylor putting workers out of their jobs? Consider an author who publishes a wildly popular work and sales are so strong that other authors cannot get their works published. Should this author be chastised for putting other authors out of work? There are more than one way to see such things. We will address performance orientation to such things later in the work. For now, it is sufficient to note that it was an improvement for the employees, for the managers, and for the owners. Beyond that, it even led to reducing the cost of products to customers. What we can address is that it makes no sense to hire people to do unproductive things. Hiring people to expend time and effort, the administration approach to working, does not keep focus on getting things accomplished. If one person can do the job, hiring two employees to do it is a challenge rather than a benefit. One of the most confusing concepts presented by Taylor was encapsulated in this simple statement. Different perspectives yield different understandings. Business leadership with its focus on the employment contract as the basis for a worker value saw this statement that Taylor's approach was all about money, that it was focused on getting as much money for the worker as the business could afford. Organized labor turned on it, still in different direction, claiming it was about treating workers equally. It was that it would be unfair to have one worker doing an easy job for the same pay as another who was working much harder. With a more developed performance perspective, we can focus on another aspect that has only become visible looking back on our performance history. It is that management and labor are in the productive effort together. It is that leaders and workers need a common basis for getting results and that it should be fair in relationship, one that both can value. It points out one of the shortcomings of the boss approach to work management. The boss responsibility was to direct the work to those who were contracted to do it. They were to keep workers at their efforts until the work was completed. The boss did not share responsibility for the results only for assignment of work and receded results. Teaming with the workers was actively discouraged. In the agent law for contracts, the bargain was based on pay and results. Our concept of employment, the one now favored by those who employed, was not contract but the law of master and servant. It was one person directing the efforts of another. It was not based on bargain but did address services to be directed. This has had remarkable consequences with a few to be mentioned even in this early presentation. The US Congress was specifically and directly forbidden to pass laws that might impair the bargain agreement between people. What people agree is what is written in their contract. Employment was not based on a bargain and Congress has passed all sorts of laws that put demands and conditions on employment that are clearly beyond anything that the parties to employment relationship had agreed. There are directives on how much people have to be paid. There are directives on how long people can work. There are directives on the safety conditions provided by working environment. There are health and safety regulations. There are conditions and regulations that address gathering of workers into third party unions or other organizations. There are regulations that require support for income tax collections. None of these address the agreement of the worker and the employer for providing hours for effort of pay. All of these add regulations to employment contracts. This is not presented as a challenge so much as an opportunity. It is an area of governance that might contain opportunities for people finding new agreements. What is immediately important in the larger scheme of things is that your worth will not be determined by the time and effort you sell to some employer. One common reason to accept higher education is to increase the worth of your time and effort to potential employers. The greater your hours value becomes, the less you will have to work to receive what you need to live in some comfort. Your hourly value can determine how many years of effort you have to sell before retirement. Higher education is, in this sense, an investment you make in order to have a greater choice in how long and how hard you must work. Performance orientation begins with recognition of value relations. The business level application addresses a value cycle with customers and what the business has to deliver to its customers to gain what it needs to continue to be profitable. There is also a personal level application addressing a value cycle with employers, addressing how much time, skill, and effort must be delivered to employers in order to achieve what you so value that you will make that commitment. As in education, there is a portion of this relationship that is subject to your personal investments. You are an active part of this value cycle and can make intelligent and meaningful decisions on when and where you commit your time and effort based on what you expect to get from that commitment. In Taylor's paper on scientific management, he noted that he was able to reduce how much it cost the company to move a ton of material. By reducing the cost paid per ton moved, he had been able to raise the incomes of those who worked for him. They were worth more to the business, their fair days pay had increased. A few workers who had learned improved performance from his applications had been lured to work for another employer who paid more per ton. As reported, they found themselves limited by being in a workforce that took offense if they applied what they had learned. By asking, they had been told that they had to work with the crew. They could not be separated out to use what they had learned. The pay they were able to earn dropped. Eventually they returned to work for Taylor and he welcomed the mistrained workman. The lesson is that we do learn things about performance. Our expectations are not always accurate and that some opportunities have good promise but turn out not to materialize. We will also have opportunities to step back from those disappointments that is part of having personal value to employers about human performance and we are specifically addressing the history of performance so that we can learn from it. This study has been designed for the specific purpose of supporting your personal empowerment, your ability to accomplish what you value. It just begins with your personal investment of time and effort in receiving the benefits of our knowledge and performance. It is administrative approach that considers the leader as the most potent of people. In the general knowledge of performance, this is a clear focus. Power is not determined by the granting of privilege but by the ability to accomplish things. The lesson we all have been presented is that those in leadership are the ones who really can accomplish things. The complementary understanding is that you, as someone who lacks privilege, will continue to be impotent until you find some way to better others or to suppress their ability to resist what you would have them do. It is a lesson that you are to compete, to become the boss, to become the one who others have to recognize as being in charge. You have to become the master who others serve. That is the nature of the education we generally receive even though the parents of children are not really privileged nor are the teachers who head the classrooms. They serve, not rule. It is something else, a concept of competition between people in the class that has been presented as conducive to learning. The lesson from scientific management is that the foreman gets a lot more accomplished by servicing the workers and what they do than the boss who works by setting assignments and duties on other people and holding them accountable. Privilege creates stability. Coordination and other support services create results. Privilege creates and enforces regulation, channeling the efforts of others to results valued by those who engage in regulation. Performance management supports people working in coordinated efforts to gain what they all value. Privilege inhibits performance. Performance management encourages it. It is just horse sense. If you want horses to pull a heavy wagon, you team them. If you want your horses to work long and hard for you, you have to take care of them and harness them together intelligently so that they can each do their part of the larger effort. Performance management is not so much an exercise of privilege to rule over others. It is an effort that is undertaken for the benefit of those who work. Coordinating the efforts of a group of workers makes them more powerful as a group and they share in that power as individuals. And this final lesson in this section is that wonderful realization that the horses are teamed that are now upset by being teamed with each other. They seem to enjoy the company of other horses who will work with them. Workers who are teamed may be miffed about having someone else direct their efforts but demonstrate human value in combining their efforts with those of others. It harkens back to the family. It is like the weaker child facing down the bully in the schoolyard because older and bigger siblings are there to provide support. With leadership by privilege the effort of the common workers were based on their contract and on assignment issued to the worker. Performance was defined as what the boss directed for accomplishment. With the efforts of the foreman performance was based on a productive result which was made valuable to all the members of the group. The foreman had an important role to play for the benefit of the larger effort that teamed the workers. Take note that this is a lesson of history. It is a search for what will be valuable for you in your empowerment as human beings. It is a general lesson that is directing the efforts of others because you are able to do so will be far less effective than working with them, sharing in what you all can value.