There is a story about a tourist on the Black Isle that stops and asks a farmer how to get to Inverness and the farmer replies “you can’t get there from here.” Sometimes when we consider how to improve productivity or do things better in the workplace, like the tourist we really need to find out where we are and whether we need to backtrack a bit, take stock and start again. Anyone that has worked for a large organisation has seen the various management fads come and go, we’ve sat through the seminars and done the eLearning and thought ‘really.’
Walking through an airport, you see newsagents’ shelves stacked with books promising to reveal the secrets of productivity—often under the banner of enhanced engagement, innovative thinking, or leadership. Yet despite the explosion of MBAs, costly leadership programs, consultants, and management courses, why do we still struggle so much? Studies consistently report low productivity levels across industries, and organisations like the health service or local councils are frequently criticised for it. In my experience, most businesses I’ve worked for rarely treated basic inefficiencies on the worksite as a priority. They may not have been making money—or even losing it—but there was little awareness or effort to address productivity management at the practical, day-to-day level.
In most firms’ senior management focus is primarily on market conditions and the strategic processes required to exploit them, but they often seem blind to the potential of improving internal performance. This is despite that many studies highlight that the effects of low productivity should also be a real concern for business, and that more focus on this might just help them to cope with other shocks more effectively. Of course, investment plays a key role—productivity relies not only on efficient individuals but on effective tools, education, and skills. Even so, studies consistently show that when all else is equal, management practices can make a measurable difference between and within firms.
This leads to a key question: what exactly are the ‘best practices’ that genuinely make a difference? Today’s management approaches often follow dominant paradigms shaped by academia and major business schools, which mirror the strategic, high-level ideas business leaders expect to hear, often sidestepping hands-on inefficiencies. Business consultants, meanwhile, focus on strategies that promise immediate returns rather than addressing the deeper, systemic issues that could enhance a business’s long-term viability. Then, we have the business books that fill airport shelves—repackaged versions of core ideas focused on leadership, innovation, engagement, and emotional intelligence. These popular titles lean heavily on self-help-like guidance, highlighting individual motivation while glossing over structural changes to improve core operations. More targeted frameworks like Lean, Agile, and Six Sigma can indeed drive significant impact within the contexts where they originated, yet there are questions about their adaptability and effectiveness when applied outside those environments, often without a deep understanding of the underlying philosophy that made them successful in the first place.
The point is, what has been successful where and why? If you read a lot of case studies of successful implementation, of ‘best practices’ they all have some thing in common. Firstly, behind any successful methods, there is an underlying philosophy—something more substantial than a grab-bag of ‘best practices.’ Secondly the changes are embedded, not temporary fixes that erode over time or collapse under pressure. These are core structural changes that can’t be by passed. Thirdly the process of improvement is iterative with outcomes being constantly measured, reviewed and refined. Yes, the improvements are subject to continuous improvement.
When considering modern productivity best practices, it’s worth starting with Frederick Taylor, whose book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, was one of the first popular books on management. Why go back as far as Taylor? Because of the way he sees things—like a worker, technician, or engineer stepping into a work environment for the first time. Taylor observes issues directly and approaches them from first principles, asking, ‘How can we do things better?’ He started as an apprentice machinist and worked his way up from the shop floor, developing his ideas from practical observation, not by adapting existing management theories.
Taylor makes two observations that are fundamental to his thinking. First, is that, generally, workers act in defence of their perceived self interest, and this results in them working against maximum productivity outcomes. The second is that managers simply do not understand processes well enough to know how much better productivity could be. The Taylor approach to resolving this problem was by optimising work through systematic study and standardisation. His approach emphasised breaking tasks into smaller, measurable steps, setting performance standards, and closely matching workers to tasks suited to their skills. Taylor advocated for collaboration between management and labour, where managers plan and supervise work scientifically, and workers execute tasks efficiently.
Its true Taylor is heavily criticised by some modern academics, principally for a perceived lack of humanity in his methods, but these criticisms seem to me to come from a biased critique of passages taken out of context or poor applications of his methods. Taylor’s emphasis on scientific task analysis and managerial oversight has been criticised as rigid and soulless, seemingly undermining worker autonomy in favour of what we might now call ‘data-driven management.’ But this interpretation misses the mark. He is a practical observer, that understands the work site and the need to align practitioner and managerial practices and personnel and improve both processes and job fit more closely.
There are a number of things to be clear about Taylor at the outset. He does not see increased productivity being achieved at the expense of workers, but in conjunction with improved pay, conditions and opportunity, and he does not see improvements just for the benefit of the firm, but also for the greater good of society. It is also clear he does not intend his methods to be proscriptive, he emphasises the experimental and incremental nature of making changes and is critical of practitioners that try to do things too quickly. He states that changes may take four to five years to achieve the necessary outcomes, and sites instances of changes that took over twenty years to accomplish.
While Taylor says his methods must be driven and led by management, and that management must take an active role on the work site. What he his actually advocating is closer manager worker cooperation, where the manager has a close on-site grasp of what workers are doing and are therefore able to analyse and improve it. He sees this type of managerial position as being one open to workers coming through from the shop floor as well is to embedded managers, thereby creating opportunity. His methods also advocate the creation of specialist support functions such as planners, positions that will also be open to workers after training. So Taylors methods should lead to a much more integrated structure with management working very closely with the process and workers.
Another aspect is that while Taylor believes that processes can be improved by application of theoretical first principles by people that have never performed the task, he does not discount input from the shop floor, in fact he encourages it. It is just that all suggestions should be subject to the scientific analyses process before being accepted and implemented. Taylor is very clear that these ideas should be given due respect and if implemented the originator should be recognised and rewarded.
Another often overlooked element of Taylor is coaching, this is a continuous process and happens when any process is changed in order to help workers fully understand and adapt to the change, but there is also continuous performance monitoring with additional personal coaching and training as required. This comes from the close integration of management with the working team, where managers can directly see and address the problem more or less in real time. How does that compare with an annual performance review given by a line manager then sent off to be buried in some remote HR department.
In many respects the term scientific management has been sullied by the application of certain of Taylors ideas in a cherry picked, proscriptive and top-down manner in search of quick returns. Many consultants used by top firms use forms of the Bedaux system that took the measurement or timing aspects of Tayor as the core from which everything was based and took it to the nth degree ignoring all the other aspects advocated by Taylor.
At its core, much of modern productivity management still draws heavily on Taylor’s foundational principles. Ironically, the misunderstandings and misapplications that plagued Taylor’s ideas are mirrored in how newer methodologies are often implemented today. For example, Lean Thinking is frequently employed to achieve quick gains by focusing on the tools alone, rather than embracing the deeper, more challenging philosophy that underpins the methodology.
So what is useful for us, what can we apply. The first thing is not to be too rigid regarding Taylor. His examples are from environments where there was a large amount of work done by repetitive unskilled or semiskilled labour, much of which has been eliminated or reduced today. There is no doubt in my mind that Taylor would have, and did, adapt his processes for knowledge-based workers and different environments. So anyone in any environment can improve it and productivity by paying attention to job fit and process, analysing and improving them by incremental experimentation and implementation coupled with continuous coaching, reviewing and using recognition and reward.
Implementing Taylor’s vision on a broad scale, which result in better pay and conditions for workers, increased profits for the firm and which is overall beneficial to society from better use of resources, requires genuine buy-in from top management. Yet one of Taylor’s core insights is that senior executives often lack a deep understanding of frontline processes and are therefore unaware of the hidden productivity gains within their own organisations. Because these gains are invisible until the process of improvement begins, it’s impossible to calculate a clear ROI upfront. Without this tangible forecast, executives tend to prefer the Minsky consultant approaches that promise quick, quantifiable returns.
In conclusion, why do I reflect on Frederick Winslow Taylor’s work. I think Taylors work reflects a clarity and simplicity, untouched by the layers of theory that later management practices build upon. Reading Taylor feels like witnessing the foundation of management thinking, derived from a first-principles perspective that sees the workplace with fresh eyes. His observations and methods offer a sort of beginner’s mind, a view unburdened by assumptions, that gets to the essence of productivity and efficiency. While modern management has integrated countless dimensions of psychology, leadership, and organisational behaviour, Taylor’s insights stand out for their directness and their focus on the elemental nature of work itself. This raw, fundamental vision makes Taylor’s work both timeless and surprisingly relevant, and therefor essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of effective productivity management.
