FREDERICK Winslow Taylor was the most influential management thinker of the 20th century. His The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) quickly put management on a new foundation: replace rule-of-thumb work methods with rules based on the objective study of work; divide work into discrete tasks; provide detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task; measure the worker according to his ability to comply with this ideal and; make liberal use of punishments and rewards.

The bosses could not get enough of Taylor’s ideas. Henry Ford implemented them in his car plants. Both Harvard and Wharton offered Taylor professorships despite his status as a Harvard dropout. After first denouncing Taylorism in 1913 for “sucking out every drop of the wage slave’s nervous and physical energy”, Lenin wrote a front-page article in Pravda in 1918 urging Russia to import the new system. Intellectuals and artists might complain that Taylor’s system was dehumanising – see Aldous Huxley in Brave New World (1932), Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) and George Orwell in 1984 (1949) – but Taylor conquered the world.

Taylor is now set to be the most influential management thinker of the 21st century as well. The new world of information technology – from interconnected computers to omnipresent cameras to the Internet of Things – is giving managers unprecedented ability to keep a watchful eye on the workforce.