Talk:NUMMI/Archives/2019

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Questionable Claim
The Overview of the article has a statement claiming that the approach used at NUMMI was "Taylorism-inspired." It cites as its source for the claim a paper titled "Democratic Taylorism: The Toyota Production System at NUMMI". From the title of this paper, it might appear that the author would agree that the approach was inspired by Taylorism, but if you read the paper, you see something quite different. The connection between Taylor and NUMMI was Taylor's time and motion studies. But Taylorism is more than just time and motion studies. Taylor had the attitude that workers were lazy and stupid [his choice of terms] and needed management to tell them exactly what to do. In his book "The Principles of Scientific Management", Taylor said "Now, one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type … Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work. He is so stupid that the word ‘percentage’ has no meaning to him, and he must consequently be trained by a man more intelligent than himself into the habit of working in accordance with the laws of this science before he can be successful."

The author of the "Democratic Taylorism: The Toyota Production System at NUMMI" paper points out that the standardized work processes at NUMMI were quite different than those that Taylorism espoused. To quote from the paper:

"I submit that NUMMI’s standardized work process represents something we might call 'democratic Taylorism,' in contrast to the more traditional 'despotic' form of Taylorism. The contrast can be described along a number of dimensions:
 * "At NUMMI, workers actively participated in defining work methods; traditional Taylorism assumed that the methods would be imposed by the Methods department.
 * "NUMMI’s standardized work process focused on work methods and assumed that better time standards would emerge from the discovery of better methods; traditional Taylorism focused on time standards, and assumed that failure to meet them was due not to inadequate methods but to insufficient effort by the worker.
 * "NUMMI taught the standardized work techniques in the same program as the kaizen process because NUMMI’s Taylorism was devoted to collective learning in the plant; traditional Taylorism was designed to coerce work effort from a recalcitrant work force, and the resulting methods and standards were rigidly fixed, prisoners of the balance of power on the shopfloor.
 * "At NUMMI, the central role of workers in the standardized work process forced management to share power with workers; traditional Taylorism was often a means for asserting management’s power over the shop floor."