The first things to tease out seems to be the differences between leadership, management, and administration.
In “Managing In The Info Era In the knowledge-based economy, workers will be valued for their ability to create, judge, imagine, and build relationships”y Geoffrey Colvin he describes how what are now the leadership pathways in business, the MBA, was originally explicitly about administration whereas now it is more in the name than in the pursuit of case studies.
Where do the boundaries of leadership, administration, and management overlap and where do they exist outside each other?
Taylorism successes in productivity were from the reorganisation of physical tasks into their constituent parts and the streamlining of these processes through specialisation of the worker.
The issues with Taylorism and his scientific management stem from his treatment of the workers as just another cog in his production machine when they are humans with complex and interrelated needs that don’t just dissapear due to corporate sticks and carrots. Later developments in management following Taylorism such as Fordism sought to use these needs to reinforce the production cycle and happiness of workers by raising wages and discounting staff car purchases which allowed greater satisfaction and economies of scale for the production line.
In the previous century the most successful large organisations were the military and the church which achieved cohesiveness through shared purpose and authoritarian power structures.
Today’s economy is based more and more on knowledge workers rather than manufacturing and production efficiencies are achieved more through automation rather than better division of tasks between humans.
The way forward in managing and leading this workforce will continue to change as the nature of work itself changes as well.
