Harvard Business Review has dubbed the years between 1911 – when Frederick Winslow Taylor published his book The Principles of Scientific Management – and 2011 “The Management Century”. Taylor’s breakthrough was to see that production line productivity could be improved by using “scientific” methods of organisation.
The approach has been criticised for imposing a mechanistic regime on workers in the interests of pure efficiency, but it triggered more research into psychological and sociological ways to make manufacturing more productive.
Plenty of management techniques have helped to improve the ability of managers to fulfil their fundamental task. China-based car manufacturers, for example, are using the production line efficiency methods pioneered by Japan’s Toyota and others.