Recently I was talking with a manager at a job-shop manufacturer who said about his company, “We do Lean.” I inquired about his experience, asking how the company trained employees. “Oh,” he replied. “We don’t want our people to think.”

That gave me such a terrible headache that, in a desperate bid for relief, I made a donation to the United Negro College Fund. A mind, after all, is a terrible thing to waste. That donation brought some relief.

Still, I was at first surprised that anybody would believe such a thing — that a business and its customers would be better served when most employees don’t use their minds. Upon reflection, however, I was surprised only that he admitted it so plainly.

There is in business, public policy, and philosophy a long history of belief that some people are suited to rule and some are suited to be ruled. In my experience a lot of managers buy into this form of elitism. They are threatened by reasoned debate and by thinking subordinates. They resent employees who are particularly skilled or who take the initiative (Hence one of my rules for surviving and thriving, if that is possible, in a mass production environment: Don’t get caught taking the initiative).

Of all the managers strongly possessed of this attitude whom I have had the misfortune to know reasonably well, this resentment of sensible, skilled, initiative-taking subordinates has been accompanied by problematic traits in other aspects of their lives: unbalanced relationships with their spouses, dysfunctional families, dishonesty, excessive drinking, a circle of friends with similarly troubled personalities, and the like.

This idea that employees shouldn’t think is often (though perhaps not always) a reflection of some manager’s personal dysfunction. For many people with personality problems, almost nothing is as important as maintaining their personal sense of intellectual superiority. This last is the source of the problem for business.

If you hire people like this they will bring their dysfunctions to work. Given the opportunity, they will build an environment that is, in its essence, family dysfunction writ large. This means, of course, that they need large numbers of codependent personalities to help them maintain the dysfunction. The entire organization becomes dysfunctional.

Again, this is not to say that this fellow who talked to me had a personality problem or was doing anything other than relating the policy of his employer, but it’s hard to see how the idea that employees shouldn’t think is consistent with Toyota’s methods.

Minoura Teruyuki, a student of Ohno Taiichi and former head of Toyota’s North American operations, has said as much:

“An environment where people have to think brings with it wisdom, and this wisdom brings with it kaizen… It’s a basic characteristic of human beings that they develop wisdom from being put under pressure. Perhaps the greatest strength of the Toyota Production System is the way it develops people.”

Expecting your employees to not think simply isn’t consistent with Toyota’s methods.

So why did this guy believe his company was Lean?

As it turns out, they would occassionally hire an industrial engineer to design work cells for them. This use of cellular manufacturing meant, in their eyes, that the company was “doing Lean.”

As usual, I have a different take on it. It sounds to me like the company was actually “doing Taylorism.”

Like Lean, Taylorism is a way of thinking — a philosophy, if you will — of why an organization exists, and how it ought to be organized and guided. This philosophy was developed in the late 19th century by Fredereick Winslow Taylor, who claimed that efficiency could be increased in a manufacturing process by breaking down production into specialized repetitive tasks and evaluating every step in every task.

Taylor was right, of course, as far as he went. However, his arrogation to management of all knowledge, and his open contempt for other beings less worthy than himself created huge problems for anybody who adopted his so-called scientific management:

“It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.” (From Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management. Italics in original.)

“I can say, without the slightest hesitation that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is … physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.” (Testimony before the Congress of the United States)

While Taylor’s contribution was important in the early days of applying mathematical and scientific principles to management, his top-down approach, his failure to consider human factors created huge problems in businesses that adopted his philosophy (compare this to Demings’ often ignored preaching on the importance of human factors). The resentment of Taylor’s philosophy ultimately and inevitably strengthened the organized labor movement.

Even worse was the effect of self-serving adaption of these ideas to public policy by people who had only pretensions to science. The eugenics movement, the various socialist movements (fascism, nazism, and communism), and the New Deal (along with its predecessor policies under the Hoover administration) all made claims to “scientific management.” Some were merely disastrous. Others, like Stalinism and the Holocaust, are epoch-defining.

Taylorism was, and is, very much a top-down approach to management which is very likely to promote bad people. It will bring out the worst in them when it does.

If you don’t want your people to think, you aren’t “doing Lean.” If you don’t want your people to think, you are “doing Taylorism.” Taylorism is very nearly the exact opposite of Lean.

 

Copyright 2014 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.