Edited by author 05-25-2003 11:22 PM
Wasn't Frederick Winslow Taylor the original time-and-motion man? His book The Principles of Scientific Management brought together many of his ideas, including the one that's usually labeled "Taylorism," -- breaking apart a task into smaller subtasks done in parallel. Before Taylor, we had craftsmen making a pair of shoes from start to finish. After Taylor we had factory workers, each repetitively gluing on a sole, shaping leather around a last, etc. More people probably know the name of his "graduate student" Henry Gantt -- who invented the Gantt chart, which has bedeviled every programmer to meet a product marketing executive who wants to take line-manufacturing principles and apply them to what is still largely the craftsman's trade of programming. Some occupations can't be split up into ever smaller subtasks (think how silly it would be to have 100 reporters each write a single line of a story in parallel). These professions are, essentially, pre-industrial, and the office power structure would be recognizable to the steward of a 14th century guild.

Taylor was a fascinating man, and Robert Kanigel's biography of him, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency is a really compelling book. After reading it I felt as though Taylor and his contemporaries were just as influential on how we think today as Freud -- just not as well known.

Edited by author 05-25-2003 06:41 PM
Heh... the girl from Lizzie McGuire is named Hilary Duff. I can tell you this because a certain 7-yr-old child has been playing the Lizzie McGuire film soundtrack in HEAVIEST rotation this afternoon.

The Clifton Web/Myrna Loy movie was a great favorite of mine. The central conceit of both the book and the movie was the father's obsession with effieciency. I can't imagine what the story will be like with that removed.

Just did some checking on Ashley Cooper

http://gilbrethnetwork.tripod.com/qv5n1.html

http://charleston.net/stories/012403/com_24gilb.shtml

Belles is very good, too, but I think I prefer the first volume.

Boy that story line sounds very changed.

It might still be good (I've enjoyed lots of Steve Martin's parent-related movies, though hated FatherOfTheBrideOfFrankenstein). But Hilary Duff raises another red flag...

Did you ever read Belles On Their Toes (ISBN:0440418976), the sequel?

The Gilbreth son who cowrote CBTD lived for many years as a proto-blogger here in Charleston, South Carolina. He wrote a daily column in the News & Courier under the pen-name Ashley Cooper (two largest rivers flowing through our city, themselves named after founding Charlestonians of some renown).

Really, it's difficult to describe his impact to anyone who didn't live here then- and the descriptor 'proto-blogger' is the best I can do. Before Calvin & Hobbes, Gilbreth's daily full column was the best-only reason for reading the paper in the mornings.

Some of the essays have been collected as 'Doing The Charleston'- but good luck finding it. I'm sure it was more or less local-only, and the people who have it aren't getting rid of it (I'm a librarian here in Charleston, and our reference-only copy is one of our most requested items- I'm hanging on to my own!)

A college *FOOTBALL* coach?!

That's more than liberties. That's a different story with the same title.

(And speaking of titles, this is nitpicky of me, but it's The Door into Summer. No 'way'.)