Taylorism is often confused with Lean, but they are fundamentally different approaches to work, leadership, and respect for people.
Taylorism refers to early “scientific management” approaches that treated work as something to be optimized for people rather than with them.
Posts included here examine time-and-motion studies, command-and-control thinking, and why Lean is often misunderstood when it’s confused with Taylorism instead of grounded in respect for people.
I’ve read most of retired General Stanley McChrystal’s excellent book Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World (I start a lot of books and finish a few). Amazon reminds me that I bought the book just over…
You might remember the hubbub (and my earlier blog post) about this article that somehow appeared in the NEJM: “Medical Taylorism.” It’s sad and frustrating that people so often talk past each other in these different “debates” about Lean. Drs. Groopman and Hartzband…
Thanks to my Amazon Kindle app on my iPad, I get to carry much of my book collection with me. Sometimes, while on the road, I end up eating dinner alone with my iPad. Recently, I was in a Japanese…
Regular readers will remember my post about the New England Journal of Medicine piece on Lean by Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. that so badly confused Lean with top-down Taylorism. John Toussaint, M.D., the former CEO of ThedaCare…
TL;DR: Trump’s “if I say do it, they’re going to do it” reflects a command and control leadership style that even the military is moving away from. Toyota, Gen. McChrystal, and decades of evidence point to something better. Command and…
In the midst of the discussion about the NEJM article, John Shook of LEI (a former Toyota employee) pointed me to this 1993 HBR article: "Time-and-Motion Regained" I believe it's freely available...
In the article posted today, Pamela Hartzband, M.D., and Jerome Groopman, M.D. (the later the author of the popular book How Doctors Think), rant about all sorts of things… some of which have nothing to do with Lean...
I learned about this the other today via Twitter (hat tip to @agile_memes), but today is “World No Resources Day” (see hashtag #WorldNoResourcesDay). See the small website at and their thoughts on “why should I join in?” I’m not sure who is behind…
I’ve recently been reading an enjoyable book by Peter Sims, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries. The practice of Kaizen, of course, brings lots of small improvements. But, it’s often surprising how breakthrough ideas with a really…
I loved the book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, but I haven’t seen the movie yet (I hear it’s good — Edit: It was GREAT). To me, it was a story about being forced to go against conventional wisdom to come up…
One of the variations of my acronym L.A.M.E. is “Lean As Misguidedly Explained,” and I recently ran across two fresh instances of this (and, for once, neither is from the Wall Street Journal!). One example is a news writer who…
TL;DR: Time and motion studies haven’t been discredited–the Taylorist mindset behind them has. When used as an expert-driven tool to control workers or set quotas, they cause harm. When used the Lean way–by teaching people to study and improve their…
