Business Studies Presentation: Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Industrial Management

Industrial Management, in business, term used to describe the techniques and expertise of efficient organisation, planning, direction, and control of the operations of a business. In the theory of industrial management, organisation has two principal aspects. One relates to the establishment of so-called lines of responsibility, drawn usually in the form of an organisation chart that designates the executives of the business, from the president to the foreperson or department head, and specifies the functions for which they are responsible. The other principal aspect relates to the development of a staff of qualified executives.

WORDS OF WISDOM:

"In tomorrows enterprise the knowledge worker will be freed to release creative energy that will result in an era of enormous innovation and discovery, fulfilling the potential and promise of the mind." Frederick Winslow Taylor

If you read Frederick Winslow Taylor from the beginning of the century, there are three fundamental things he taught:

€ Find the best practice wherever it exists. Today we call it benchmarking.

€ Decompose the task into its constituent elements. We call it business process re-design.

€ Get rid of things that don't add value. Work out, we call it now.

I subjectively believe that from the above info we're basically doing things one more time than we need to do them. My argument is that simply getting better is usually not enough. Whether it involves cycle time, quality or whatever, most of re-engineering has been about catching up.