Over the past 100 years, management trends have evolved as building products and managing people became more and more complex. Below is a brief history of major trends that shaped todays organizations.
Scientific Management – Taylorism & Fordism – 1910s
Most of today’s management practices have their roots in the early 1900s with the principles of scientific management by Frederick Taylor as well as the Model T manufacturing process that Henry Ford pioneered. Taylor believed you could decrease unit costs by identifying the best way to perform a task and ensuring that everybody followed that best way. The key to efficiency was for management to standardize and enforce workflow best practices, break down tasks, assign them to specialists, and closely monitor outputs to minimize variances.
Ford applied the moving assembly line process to automotive manufacturing of the Model T reducing the time it took to produce a car to about 90 minutes and reducing the price of the car from $825 to $260. With these improvements, by the 1920s, more than half of the registered cars in the world were Ford.
Scaling – 1930s
The 1930s saw Fordism spread to other automobile manufacturers and eventually to other industries as they tried to produce cars and products at scale. This also coincided with World Wars that required planning, mobilizing, coordinating, and communicating globally at scales not seen before. As a result, a lot of military structures, silos, and hierarchies found their way into organizational structures to manage the complexities of operating and manufacturing at scale.
Plan Do Check Act – Deming – 1950s
In the 1950s, products became more and more complicated, worker conditions suffered without labor laws, and as a result quality and productivity decreased.
Douglas McGregor published his research and book The Human Side of The Enterprise which focused on theory X and theory Y approaches to leadership. These referred to having an attitude that workers generally lack motivation, enjoyment, and responsibility in their work, an attitude that workers are content, motivated, and long for responsibility.
Around the same time, Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda radically shifted the role of management at Toyota and improved product quality by empowering front-line workers to stop the entire manufacturing line the moment they noticed a potential problem. This was influenced by Edward Deming’s work around statistical quality controls and his Plan Do Check Act approach to continuous improvement.
Lean Manufacturing – 1970s
The 1970s saw Toyota’s quality products, speed of manufacturing and reduced production cost make it a leader in the automotive world, and lean manufacturing booms and spread to other industries including software development.
Agile Software Development – 1990s
By the 1990s the complexities reached new levels with the popularity of personal computers and embedded computer systems. Software development had become primarily based on a planned approach to product development that followed concrete steps of requirements, design, build, test, and deliver. This phased and sequential approach was not suitable for the complexities of the work and resulted in failed projects due to difficulties in making changes, managing uncertainties, delays, missed deadlines, and cost overruns.
Iterative approaches to product development started to emerge like Scrum and eXtreme Programming which focused on cross-functional and self-organizing teams collaborating closely together to deliver value quickly while regularly getting feedback and incorporating both product and process improvement all along the way.
2020s – Business Agility
With the success of agile ways of working in software development, organizations are now seeking to expand that across the enterprise to other functional areas from HR, to marketing, to finance, and to the organization as a whole. That is, not just improving the practices within the different functions, but by re-examining the existing structures and re-aligning them into smaller teams that are customer-focused making the company more agile and responsive to latest changes in the market.