The Principles of Scientific Management

The root of everything modern management reacts against — and the book is far more interesting than the caricature. Taylor's argument is that craft knowledge held by individual workers should be made explicit, measured, and systematised by management. Without this move there is no Drucker, no Toyota Production System, no agile; each is a response to problems Taylor either created or revealed. His language is blunt and his assumptions about workers are unflattering, but the underlying question — who owns the knowledge of how work is done? — remains live in every product organisation today. Read it as the founding text of a century-long argument, not as a manual.