 In this lesson, we will review that original development of performance as it came about following the presentation of scientific management. We will see what happened when this study first burst into the world of corporate privilege. There are lessons such as everyone being upset by the changes made, even though those changes seem to benefit everyone who was part of the change. This is a lesson in our humanity, something we need to learn if we are to design and initiate changes for ourselves and for others. It addresses costs that we will incur whenever we initiate or join in a change action. Most agree that the performance movement began with an engineer named Frederick Taylor. In 1911, he published a paper prepared for a technical audience titled, The Principles of Scientific Management. He dealt with the then common situation of workers being more interested in their steady employment than in actually accomplishing things. Workers were then addressed as performance units. They were directed to do tasks, and working on those tasks was a basis for their pay. The boss was paid to assign their work to keep them at their tasks until completed and to collect the results on behalf of the business owners. They generally owed little to the corporate business leaders, and certainly not loyalty. They were paid to show up and to put forth as directed by a hired boss, with the boss representing the business owning family. The individual worker was the performance unit of general industry, a resource hired as a means to do the work of the business. They all sold their time and effort as a way to earn a living. They owed more loyalty to one another as fellow hired servants than to the business. It was an us and them environment. Management was running things, and bosses were representing the leaders to the hired help. Taylor had been hired as a worker, but promoted to being the boss of a machinist group, as he had at least partial college education. The paper Taylor published is available online, and it addresses his experiences in dealing with his former working allies. It addresses some of the challenges he faced in setting management over work processes that subordinate workers had been doing. In short, he noticed that different processes were used by skilled workers who felt that they were doing the essentials of good performance. Knowing that differing methods could not all be essentials, he studied their work processes, and found that even the most skilled workers were doing many things that didn't even have to be done. This was the beginning of our performance management efforts, defining the work that hirelings were to do. Beyond that, he studied the work itself, and tried to establish how much work product could be expected from using his improved methods. That was so great a change that it created all kinds of dissent. Other workers who had been in charge of their own work methods reacted badly, even with some threats of violence if he continued trying to tell them how to do their jobs. Many felt with some justification that this was wholly inappropriate, that they owed it to other workers who just set a good pace that everyone could meet. There are great challenges that Taylor's approach actually accomplished remarkable results. He did more than double what a worker could accomplish in a day's effort, even as it reduced their effort and led to shorter work days. You might think that this would be readily accepted by higher management, which received the benefit of more output for business dollars spent on production. To the contrary, they accepted the benefits, but not the increasing value of workers who were managed. They readily accepted the work measurement approach to increase performance, but generally acted to demand the same amount of time and effort while just continuing worker pay. They tried to get a lot more without having to pay for it, and when that didn't work, they blamed Taylor and his interferences for frustrating their good and proper management efforts. They accused him of treating workers as cogs in the wheels of industry, encouraging worker abuse by focusing everything on financial concerns. The challenge they faced in this is that leadership were the ones who had been treating workers as replaceable units of industry, and Taylor had focused on treating workers individually and working for each worker's betterment. But the leaders were in charge, and their voices are the ones that were heard by most. Even today, you have to actually look at Taylor's writing to get a fair sense of what he was doing. At the time of this record, modern management still addresses the problem of Taylorism as a failed approach to work management. The fact that it more than doubled what was accomplished seems an irritant rather than a benefit. The paper Taylor produced was not even written for managers, but for engineers who were involved in productive performance work. It specifically addressed the benefits to come from intentional and directed study of performance processes with special attention to ceasing to do the things that did not contribute to gaining results. One specific and important lesson is that performance management is an essential part of efficient and effective performance efforts. It is that some non-worker needs to look at the work that is being performed with attention to what work is being done to gain the desired results. Workers would continue to do what was done in the past because it did work even if it was overly difficult and complicated. Performance management involved a different skill set. That common approach, simply assigning work to the workers as experts in what they do is just not effective. There is something a lot better than trusting the hired help to figure out the best way to do the job. So what is good work process? This is the heart of industrial engineering and provides one definition of efficiency. The answer is one where everything the worker does contributes to the value productive output. It is not a measure of how hard the worker works or how fast the work is done, but the limited efforts that must be completed to gain the desired results. Performance is result based, where we have largely been educated to address how to do things and Taylor's work has addressed what had to be done to accomplish something that other people can value. Taylor's work focused on delivering value to the employing business. This is the heart of performance orientation and it comes to focus on something that is to be accomplished. Mr. Taylor was supporting the efforts of his friends and fellow employees with open respect for them as workmen. He just did not respect what they had been doing. He opened new capacities for accomplishment. He respected these same people. He worked with them and learned from them when he came into the group as a workman. He was not their enemy. He was the worker who had been promoted. As a fellow worker, he was uniquely able to study what they were doing with some hope of understanding it and seeing the value of their expertise. He was able to evaluate it in terms of what others were doing that also seemed to gain valued results. We are dealing with human performance. We all, and that also includes you and me, will function in a like way. We will institutionalize what we do, learning to repeat all the efforts that seem to yield results that we value. We will learn to value these partly because they work and partly because they are what we have learned to do. We institutionalize our own work efforts. We will also resist change, often preferring to do more and harder processes to having to learn something new in place of what we had learned before. In this study, we will learn to work with our own processes and become more likely to commit the necessary effort to create changes. We will be able to do this when the value to be gained is sufficient. Instead of just seeing what we know as limits, we will also be able to see them as opportunities. We will have new options based on a clearer understanding of both costs associated with change and the value that is associated, available from specific change efforts. The goal is to intelligently invest in change efforts. A personal aspect of this study is to accept your own humanity in this. Your human instinct is to do what apparently worked before, whether it is good as you can do or not. If there is to be an intentional change, it will involve an effort, a personal cost to accomplish that change. We will be addressing personal investment and learning to see clearly when some benefit is sufficient to accept the cost of associated with doing something new. Daphne goes to the store with a list that includes paper towels. The brand she has bought for years is there but has jumped in price. The prices of other towels are unchanged. Does she change or accept the increased cost just because she knows the product? The added price is a cost that this product has put upon her, a discouragement to her purchasing behavior. Will she be better off learning a new purchasing strategy? Daphne's decision could benefit an intelligence that has not been common for individual efforts and is actively discouraged by those who gathered in corporate efforts. Is she dealing with a simple reaction to her change in her environment or is she considering her personal involvement as a factor? She had a purpose. She was serving it. But it seems less acceptable to continue it. Daphne's predetermined decision to buy that one brand simplified her shopping. It worked for her benefit. Following that behavior was learned because it worked for her. It did not limit her choices but was an opportunity to simplify what she would do. The new situation has provided Daphne with a new opportunity. Of course she's not going to spend more than a few seconds on this but it is her decision based on her purpose and her sense of value. She will make the choice that seems best to her in that moment. We do design our own behaviors. We always try to figure out the best processes to use in meeting the continuous flood of these decisions that life puts upon us. And this can be done with intelligence and some attention to our personal needs and wants. The better our decision rules are the more they can contribute to assuring that our needs and wants are satisfied. Now consider what happens if Daphne comes to understand that the only reason that product got more expensive is that the manufacturer decided to raise the price. He calculated the probable loss in customers and saw that his profits would likely go up because his product was so accepted. Daphne talks to her friends on this and they are just as ticked as she is about being so treated. They publish it widely. They publish that they are not going to buy that product that would put a burden on them. And soon it is a public boycott. The manufacturer's decision is in serious error. And the expected profits are replaced with losses. When the people come together and more importantly learn that they are agreed, those who would act as privileged can find that they are not. People are the real decision makers in human civilization. The decision of business leadership to denigrate Taylor's work as harmful to workers fell flat. The workers were ending up better paid and working less time using reduced effort to earn their higher pay. The workers saw this as a benefit and supported the change. Business leaders had no reason to accept this. Being good for the business was not the same as being good for the corporate leader family. They did not see the benefit as personal and could continue to resist Taylorism. They refused to accept the concept into their area of management. The visible result was the sharpening of division between management and labor. The workers put in their time and effort to achieve their own welfare and the actions of management appeared intent on damaging it. Unionism was one answer. It was the workers finding such common purpose in resisting the decisions of management that they were able to find agreement and join their decision power by empowering corporate union activities. There was a new and very potent corporate labor family that was privileged to act by union membership. Labor leaders also had privilege and entered into conflict and competition with business leadership. So what was Taylor doing to cause all this commotion? He was preventing his workers from expending their time and effort where it did not contribute to productive results. As an intelligent man, you have to wonder what the heck really was going on that such a valuable approach became a matter of contention that would divide civilization into competing camps. One partial answer is that he was also bringing people together for a shared purpose. That is a very real threat to privilege at all levels. Another partial answer is that he was indeed reducing the freedom of workers to select their own performance processes. He was exercising authority to tell them what to do with the time and effort they were selling to the business. While they obviously had the authority to do that and rankle the workers, they looked upon it as a cost he would put on them. Another partial answer is in the leader authorities. The leaders thought they were purchasing workers to support their chosen business directions and to work for them. Here this supervisor was telling them what they had to do for some alternative productive purpose. Of course they looked at it as some sort of work management revolt against their privileged rule over the business. Business leaders reacted poorly as well. Taylor seemed to be working for someone else, refusing to accept their leader purposes as his own. Of course they denigrated his efforts. And then there was management itself. This involved a change from the boss who represented the leaders to a foreman who teamed with the workers to do some assigned performance. While teaming with the workers also had obvious value, it was not responsive to business leadership direction. The teaming was based on serving the productivity of the business instead of directly honoring the privileged leadership. While the conflicts between those in production and those who ran things was really rather minor, the ability of common people to resist privileged rulers was not appreciated in the leader family above the glass wall. And then there was the nature of the change. There was a massive increase in the performance being achieved by the workers through teaming them. It was a significant benefit to the business on every level. It was a benefit to the workers as they earned more from their commitment of time and effort to the business that hired them. It was a benefit to the owners as it increased the value of the business. It was a benefit to the customers as it opened competitions that lowered customer prices. The cost was not suffered by the business, but by the leadership. The business was benefited at the expense of privilege. It limited the decisions that leaders could make in running the corporation. It exposed the costs that the business had been incurring because of what leadership had generally chosen to do. Of course, they reacted badly. The disruption was much wider than the impact on leaders. But it was very different for the workers and work leaders. They were suffering a civilization defining change. The reaction among workers was confusion. It only had direction because it was a change, a cost that was suffered by workers because this tailor wanted to tell them how to do their jobs. That became one of the drivers for worker agreement. Their immediate boss was putting that cost on them. Taylor was threatened by his workers who were otherwise his friends. That is part of the record. To understand the magnitude of this change, we have to address that amazing stability achieved by privileged leadership. The workers had been getting what they worked for. They went to work by selling their time and effort. And they got paid for providing these for direction by the business. They did not have much of a problem to be solved. No apparent benefit from Taylor taking over their work processes. The workers were not paid for what they accomplished. They were paid for selling their time and skill and effort for direction to work efforts. This was being accomplished. What Taylor was doing trashed their relationship to the business. He had obvious authority to do it. But that only made his interference more egregious. The business had been stable in worker relations. The boss represented the owners who ruled. The boss assigned the work. The workers did the work and achieved pay for the time and effort they expended working as directed. That had no direct connection to performance. And the workers commonly arranged to appear working so as to satisfy the boss. But otherwise limited what they accomplished as a courtesy to other workers. Workers generally tried to continue as the hired help. Rather than trying to stand out as somehow better or more able than other workers. Such was not rewarded that would put them at odds with those who worked alongside of them. They took care of each other protecting each other's employment. Taylor in his writing addressed this as soldiering. He took a most challenging new view and stubbornly maintained it. He addressed what the production workers had to do in terms of value to the business. He treated the workers as if they owed something to the business that hired them. Something beyond just spending their time and effort as directed. Of course it was treated as worker blasphemy. As a crime against the very workers who would become more valuable. It was also a huge disruption to privileged leadership in terms of what the boss did in representing business leadership to those commoner workers. While they applauded his new ability to measure performance in terms of productive expectation of output. They were highly skeptical of a business authority over workers who did not directly answer to them. Taylor's new boss duties involved the study of work process. Which is wholly unacceptable serving to support the workers who had been hired to support the leaders. Taylor seemed to have it backwards. But this Taylor was exceedingly stubborn. He refused to change even on threat of worker revolt. He worked to empower a new type of work leader, a foreman, who would share responsibility for productive output with the workers. If only his strange attempts had just collapsed they could have fired Taylor and things would go back to when the leaders were more in charge of things. But that changed approach did not collapse. It led to a wholly unexpected leap in performance potentials. It led to workers more satisfied with their own efforts earning more while working less. It led to the lowest level manager teaming with the workers to assure what they accomplished. A value achieved by ignoring leaders ability to direct workers. Once demonstrated there was no way to change things back. The damage had been done and privilege suffered. The general leader reaction was quarantine, keeping this work together philosophy from infecting the rest of the business. Employees working in the management system still answered meekly to leader directions. Looking back with the perspective urged upon us even today it seems hard to understand why such an innocuous changes helping people be more productive might have stirred such a hornet's nest of consequences. Taylor's original work just addressed eliminating unnecessary and ineffective work efforts. What's the big deal in that? It saves time and effort. It saves money. It gets things done. How can that be a problem? The answer is that we are not dealing with a problem in performance. It is a cultural problem. This was infusion of a cultural change in a privilege driven system. The value of a privilege system is seen in its wonderful stability, its ability to keep things going to the benefit of those who are privileged. It includes service to commoners as a way to maintain that stability. The workers were not dissatisfied with their business culture but embraced it. When Taylor suggested that they change, they reacted with threats. Management was not dissatisfied. The leaders were saying to their own purposes quite acceptably business was continuing. One way to understand this is by example. How would you react if someone claimed to rewrite the Constitution to better serve the United States? The immediate reaction would be, who are you to rewrite my country's Constitution? Then it would be suspicion. What was their agenda and what would they really be serving? And then there is the obvious reaction by current government leaders. Their knee-jerk reaction would be based on privilege being threatened. If we wanted the Constitution to be rewritten, we would have done it ourselves. That is the human reaction and we all recognize ourselves in it. It is also the very human reaction to the changes that scientific management was urging upon business culture. It was not so much the change itself which was admittedly minor. It was a shift in culture that was initiated by that small change. It was the potential for people coming together for a purpose not promoted by corporate leadership. Taylor's work actually started the change. The change continued with the help of many others, who realized the potential for increased teaming in the workforce. It was new coordination of a group effort, not the simplistic and local efforts of Taylor, that caused the development of performance thinking. He opened the door and shoved a doorstop of profitable operation that could resist even the consistent efforts of others to close it again. Where he re-benefit from having a manager supporting a few workmen as they performed their function, others expanded the knowledge to address larger, consistent, and coordinated efforts by work groups. Where Taylor re-benefit from defining the work process to be used for efficient work efforts, others expanded to designing the interactive efforts of workers who shared their efforts, each doing part of the larger performance process. It led to trashing the very concept of a workman selling individual efforts to act as temporary servants to the business. They started working as groups that answer to a productive purpose. That was a cause of great concern. It was a change in a way of life. As scientific management gained in scope and reach, so did the vitronic reaction by corporate leadership. While there was a great challenge in actually attacking what had been accomplished, where everyone seemed to come out ahead, the assaults became more personal. Taylor was accused of having a different purpose, one of subjugating the workers to his performance purpose. He was accused of treating workers as if only the dollars expended on them was really of interest. They accused him of putting his study of performance above the personal needs of the worker, treating them as impersonal business resources. Of course, with the clarity of hindsight, we see that it was leadership that was engaged in trying to pay workers less, even while producing more. We see that it was Taylor who was promoting the welfare of individual workers as they departed production. And it was the leadership that treated workers like replaceable units of production. It was leaders who were putting their sense of privilege before any purpose that their commoner workers might prefer. In short, the leadership of the day and of decades after accused Frederick Taylor of what they had been doing, doing that severely limited what workers got for their efforts and disregarded what they had to do to get it. The very value of being privileged barons of business was being threatened. And every attempt to regain their control and reset production to serve leader goals and objectives was punished with reductions in performance. There has been amazing ingenuity and eroic management efforts and resetting production efforts to serve management goals and objectives. The fact that it damages performance continues to be treated as an annoyance. Those most interested in the immediate changes being accomplished came with their own perspective on costs and benefits. For the worker, it was some increase in pay while the work was markedly reduced. This was generally a good thing. But they had to put up with someone else telling them how to do their jobs. But since they had hired out for that purpose, it was not too great a burden for them. In general, management was upset by the changes. The changes put work upon those who directly supervised workers as they had to service the workers instead of just handing them the ball and waiting for a return. Then there was the impact on competition. It forced the leaders to consider what their competition was doing. And they had to sufficiently control prices to stay competitive. That was a bummer having to cater to customers who didn't even answer to the business. What these miss is the larger impact of the change on our business culture. It made the workers more valuable to the businesses that hired them. Where the privilege approach had been able to maintain stability. It had done so by restricting the value of workers and encouraging them to further restrict their own value by the division of their purposes from that of the business and its leadership. The change had a great impact on the larger business culture in America. And another aspect of the change is that privilege leadership could see the significant benefits from the change but found it so utterly foreign to privilege-based concepts that they refused to accept any change in their performance of management. Labor improved management did not. The division between management and labor widened and sharpened further threatening to disempower even privilege leadership. They had to pay attention to the privileged labor leaders who had become the new barons of labor. And the center of this conflict and culture we find is the employment contract. Is it to be the purchase of hours and efforts? Or is it to be gaining business resources to assure the performance of the organization? Do you hire people as workers or do you hire people for their ability to fill a job? Are employees to be laborers who perform the business function? Or are they to be the best manner woman for the job? There is continuing tension that two do not mix. One of the most puzzling things for new graduate performance engineers is the treatment of foremen by senior management. Senior leadership treats them as both a necessity and as a personal rebuke to their sense of privilege. They are unwanted, even as they are recognized as a necessity for effective performance. Leader denigration of foremen is pervasive in industry. It is that these foremen are not real managers at all. They are not educated to perform like those in management. Of course, there is the reality challenge that these supposedly inferior work leaders perform management and supervision for 10 to 25 workers, none of whom understands much of anything about management. While their counterparts in management supervise and manage less than half as many, with many of those being managed, being skilled management workers in their own right. Again, this is the sort of observation that people are taught to avoid. It is a performance observation that distracts from the exercise of privilege and might even denigrate the efforts of business leadership. But what really is the difference? How is the foreman really so different than the management of an accounting or engineering function? The answer is in the intentional teaming of the employees in their groups. The management leaders' functions are still those of the boss. It is assignment and receipt of work product. The work leaders' functions are servicing performance in terms of group output. It is providing teaming and support services to those who success as employees as defined by delivery of valued group outputs. Their difference is in the distinction between satisfying assignments and delivering productive output. The difference for the working people is in fulfilling boss assigned purposes and working people delivering valued output to those who can value it. The boss has authority granted from higher management and is exercised in full to assignments from the boss. The foreman's duty is assigned to the group and assignment shared with the workers so that the foreman succeeds or fails together with the workers who are managed. Leadership has strongly favored the boss approach, but reality intrudes on that preference. In reality, those who work for the foreman can be many times more effective at gaining valued group results than those who work for a boss manager. Leader preference has given way to allow a foreman to perform their functions. The foreman came on the scene in the first few decades of the 1900s and there were very few bosses a decade later. The boss approach just can't compete when it comes to getting the work done. Reality refused to honor leader preferences. I must also note that senior management continues unchanged in its culture or its aims. It is still focused on establishing its own goals and objectives that ostensibly serve performance even though they do not. Management continues to challenge the need for or even the wisdom of having foreman instead of bosses. The rejection and hostility toward performance thinking has continued back in the 90s. There was even an attempt to again promote workers as the real experts in performance process, cutting out the primary teaming function of the foreman in favor of workers acting as performance units. Of course, this was a matter for serious consideration by business leadership. The only argument against it is the reality of not working to advantage. In a nutshell, management has continued unchanged and demonstrating that wonderful stability that is associated with privilege-based organization. The only changes it will promote have continued to be toward increase in privilege. The same challenges that faced Taylor in the early 1900s are still with any so bold as suggest that workers team for a purpose not set by business leaders. This concludes our introduction to performance concepts. In our next session, we will be looking at the foundation for industrial engineering, the formation of technical support for the performance that followed from and greatly expanded upon Taylor's scientific management.