Introduction to Get Ready Academy For Management Skills #business_administration #MBA #marketing

Classical Perspective
The practice of management can be traced to 3000 b.c., to the first government organizations
developed by the Sumerians and Egyptians, but the formal study of management is
relatively recent.21 The early study of management as we know it today began with what is
now called the classical perspective.
The classical perspective on management emerged during the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. The factory system that began to appear in the 1800s posed challenges
that earlier organizations had not encountered. Problems arose in tooling the plants,
organizing managerial structure, training employees (many of them non-English-speaking
immigrants), scheduling complex manufacturing operations, and dealing with increased
labor dissatisfaction and resulting strikes.
These myriad new problems and the development of large, complex organizations demanded
a new approach to coordination and control, and a “new sub-species of economic
man—the salaried manager”22—was born. Between 1880 and 1920, the number of professional
managers in the United States grew from 161,000 to more than 1 million. 23 These
professional managers began developing and testing solutions to the mounting challenges
of organizing, coordinating, and controlling large numbers of people and increasing worker
productivity. Thus began the evolution of modern management with the classical perspective. This perspective contains three subfields, each with a
slightly different emphasis: scientific management, bureaucratic
organizations, and administrative principles.24
Scientific Management
Scientific management emphasizes scientifically determined
jobs and management practices as the way to improve
efficiency and labor productivity. In the late 1800s, a young
engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), proposed
that workers “could be retooled like machines, their physical
and mental gears recalibrated for better productivity.”25
Taylor insisted that improving productivity meant that management
itself would have to change and, further, that the
manner of change could be determined only by scientific
study; hence, the label scientific management emerged. Taylor
suggested that decisions based on rules of thumb and tradition
be replaced with precise procedures developed after
careful study of individual situations.26
The scientific management approach is illustrated by the
unloading of iron from rail cars and reloading finished steel
for the Bethlehem Steel plant in 1898. Taylor calculated that
with the correct movements, tools, and sequencing, each
man was capable of loading 47.5 tons per day instead of the
typical 12.5 tons. He also worked out an incentive system that paid each man $1.85 a day
for meeting the new standard, an increase from the previous rate of $1.15. Productivity at
Bethlehem Steel shot up overnight.
Although known as the father of scientific management, Taylor was not alone in this
area. Henry Gantt, an associate of Taylor’s, developed the Gantt chart, a bar graph that
measures planned and completed work along each stage of production by time elapsed.
Two other important pioneers in this area were the husband-and-wife team of Frank
B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth. Frank B. Gilbreth (1868–1924) pioneered time and motion
study and arrived at many of his management techniques independent of Taylor. He
stressed efficiency and was known for his quest for the one best way to do work. Although
Gilbreth is known for his early work with bricklayers, his work had great impact
on medical surgery by drastically reducing the time that patients spent on the operating
table. Surgeons were able to save countless lives through the application of time
and motion study. Lillian M. Gilbreth (1878–1972) was more interested in the human
aspect of work. When her husband died at the age of 56, she had 12 children ages 2 to
19. The undaunted “first lady of management” went right on with her work. She presented
a paper in place of her late husband, continued their seminars and consulting,
lectured, and eventually became a professor at Purdue University.27 She pioneered in
the field of industrial psychology and made substantial contributions to human resource
management.
Exhibit 2.2 shows the basic ideas of scientific management. To use this approach, managers
should develop standard methods for doing each job, select workers with the appropriate
abilities, train workers in the standard methods, support workers and eliminate
interruptions, and provide wage incentives.
The ideas of scientific management that began with Taylor dramatically increased
productivity across all industries, and they are still important today. Indeed, the idea of
engineering work for greater productivity has enjoyed a renaissance in the retail industrySupermarket chains such as Meijer Inc. and Hannaford, for example, use computerized
labor waste elimination systems based on scientific management principles. The system
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