Which management framework is right for your company?

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See how management frameworks change over time to keep up with the current challenges facing businesses and government agencies.

AUSTIN, TEXAS, UNITED STATES, June 22, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ – How management theory helped define the modern world

To get a complete picture of the future of management frameworks, let’s go back to the very beginning – the beginning of the 20th century, when the first waves of the industrial revolution were still in full swing in the United States.

(1908) Fordism

It was these days that Henry Ford launched the famous Ford Model T (1908), and by 1914 Ford factories were producing thousands of cars every week. The philosophy of “Fordism” transformed automobile manufacturing from highly skilled craftsmanship assembling individual parts to a new era of unskilled labor assembling “interchangeable” parts (built to precise tolerances) on a moving assembly line.

(1911) Scientific Management (AKA Taylorism)

It was during this era that Frederick Taylor became famous for what we would now call the world’s first “business consultant”. Taylor’s pioneering work, The Principles of Scientific Management, pioneered the use of time management studies to increase the productivity and efficiency of workers in factories, especially in the steel industry.

(1910s) Gantt chart

With his charting system of the same name, which clearly visualizes complex deadline dependencies between individual tasks, Henry Gannt has helped to put complex large-scale projects in order. Gannt diagrams were adopted by US military planners in World War I and are still an important management tool to this day; one remains easily identifiable to users of Microsoft Project and other software planning tools.

(1930s) Shewhart Cycle, Later Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)

In the interwar period, Walter A. Shewhart, who worked at Bell Telephone, wrote Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product (1931), followed by Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control (1939). Together, these works form the basis of today’s modern statistical quality control systems. The physicist and employee W. Edward Deming further developed these ideas for increasing product quality in industrial production and promoted them as the “Shewhart cycle”. After World War II, this system became better known under the acronym PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) and, as we shall see in a moment, was widely adopted by Japanese industrialists.

(1940s and 1957) CPM Critical Path Method

Another management system that is still widely used today is CPM, short for Critical Path Method. Building on DuPont’s management philosophies in the 1930s, CPM was used as an organizational tool to manage the sprawling but top-secret Manhattan project to build the world’s first nuclear weapon during World War II. The U.S. military formalized the definition of CPM in 1957 as part of Polaris’ submarine-based nuclear missile program. The CPM approach is so familiar to us today that we often use CPM jargon in everyday conversations, for example when we say: “We have to ‘follow up’ a project” – without knowing that it is an expression, which comes straight from CPM terminology.

(1958) PERT (project evaluation review technique)

Simultaneously with the formalization of CPM in 1957, the US Navy introduced PERT (Project Evaluation Review Technique) in 1958. It is a visually oriented project planning tool that complements CMP to a large extent. PERT makes it easier for project planners to visualize critical path tasks and calculate the impact of changes (such as adding more resources or unexpected delays) on planned delivery estimates. PERT charts can be presented in a form that at first glance resembles a Gannt chart, although more and more activity descriptions are being moved to each action node in the chart (an approach known as an Activity-on-Node (AON)) Method).

The American origins of Japan’s leading global management framework

After World War II, Japan fell under US military rule, and Japanese industrialists looking to rebuild their factory took inspiration from US experts.

Perhaps no other American had a greater influence on Japanese industrial production than W. Edward Deming during this period.

Deming, who, as noted, promoted the pre-war statistical quality control methods developed by Walter A. Shewhart, was hired by US officials to oversee the 1947 Japanese census, which pioneered the use of sampling, which are still used by the US Department of the Census and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Deming later trained hundreds of Japanese engineers, managers, and scholars in statistical process control (SPC) – many of whom were employed by world-famous brands like SONY. In the course of this, Deming became a celebrated “guru” for business consultants and was honored in 1951 by the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) for his contribution to Japanese manufacturing quality with the introduction of the annual Deming Prize.

(1948-1975) TPS: Toyota Production System (now known as Toyota Way)

Much of the mindset behind today’s management frameworks can be traced back to the companies that Sakichi Toyoda founded, starting with the Toyoda Automatic Loom Works, which were founded in 1926. (Known today as Toyota Industries Co., Ltd.)

Ford, Taylor, Gannt, Shewhart and Deming helped lay the foundation for today’s modern management frameworks. But Sakichi Toyoda, who founded Toyoda Automatic Loom Works in 1926, and his eldest son Kiichiro Toyoda, who founded his subsidiary Toyota Motor Co., Ltd. in 1937. founded – as well as the Toyota engineers Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda – were responsible for inventing some of the most significant and influential manufacturing principles of the 20th century.

Consider the idea of ​​stopping the production line if there was a problem – this first appeared at Toyoda Automatic Loom Works. The use of the “5 Why” efficiency mnemonics – Seiri (sort), Seiton (organize), Seiso (clean), Seiketsu (standardize) and Shitsuke (hold) – are also used to this day to describe factory production. to organize maximum productivity and the highest possible quality.

Led by the company’s brilliant engineers, Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda, the Toyota companies introduced one revolutionary idea after another from 1948 to 1975, including:

JIT just-in-time production
Kaizen (continuous improvement)
Kanban (visible production cards)
Muda (reducing waste)

Together, these concepts came to be known as the TPS or Toyota Production System (better known today as the Toyota Way), which paved the way for future management systems like TQM, SixSigma, Lean Manufacturing and more.

America is rediscovering its own quality management skills by studying Japanese manufacturing methods

What did American manufacturers do in the post-war period?

The 1950s and 1960s were a period of flashy consumerism, with television commercials promoting the new models of cars, appliances, or home entertainment systems – as part of a strategy that emphasized planned obsolescence over quality.

(1960s – 1970s) ZD (Zero Defects)

As the quality of American products dwindled in this era, quality control director Philip B. Crosby of aerospace company Martin Company (later Martin Marietta and now part of Lockheed) set about reviving quality production along the supply chain.

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Julia Solodovnikova
Formaspace
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