On July 6 1934, in the midst of the Great Depression, a convoy of 2 limousines, 5 Citroen half-tracks, 130 horses loaded with provisions and gasoline and 53 hollywood cowboys left Edmonton Alberta to begin a supposed scientific expedition across an uncharted region of the Canadian Rockies. Provisions included caseloads of champagne, exotic food such as caviar and truffles, clothing for society balls, a movie camera, and 100 pounds of surveying equipment - this last item being the first dropped when the going got tough. The entourage included the leader's wife, a lady friend, a valet, a maid-in-waiting, a surveyor and a famous hollywood cameraman to record the trip for posterity.2
Now, it will come as no more surprise to you than it did to the Edmonton locals that when the entourage actually encountered the rocky mountains, forests, rivers and swamps of Canada's northwest bush, that one by one the vehicles were destroyed. And that supplying the huge party quickly became a nightmare. When the snow began to fly in October, the project was abandoned at a loss estimated to be over $250,000 - 1934 dollars!
What might come as a surprise is that this ill-conceived, poorly planned, badly executed, misguided trek was the brainchild of Charles Bedaux, a French born American millionaire who happened to be the western world's pre-eminent management guru.
During the Great Depression, as in other times when money is short, industry and government spent large sums of money on opportunistic management consultants like Bedaux who promise to recover more than their cost by increasing productivity! And as economic conditions worsened, Bedaux's appeal increased.
Bedaux's consultancy was a flexible variant of Taylorism, so-called after the American Frederick Taylor who is still known today as `the father of Scientific Management'. To maximize efficiency `scientific method' would be applied to the shop floor. Performance measures were required. Goals could then be set and workers paid accordingly. Time and motion studies were the order of the day. Stop watch sales increased.
At the turn of the century, Taylorism was adopted and implemented by such managerial visionaries and pioneers as the Harvard Graduate School of Business, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and of course Albert Speer the economic organizer of the Third Reich. Of this lot, Bedaux seems to have been the most opportunistic.
From the outset, it was clear that this approach would require a new managerial professional class as overseers, planners, and efficiency experts. Taylor himself said: ``As a general rule, the more men you have working efficiently in the management ... the greater will be your economy.''3 In the U.K. today management consultants are thriving. British management consultancy traces its roots with pride back to British Bedaux Limited. In 1996, the British Management Consulting Association boasted of having 7,267 consultants as members, three and a half times their numbers twenty years earlier.
And where might the future be for Taylorism? Well, in 1976 Peter Drucker wrote:
``The need today is ...to learn from [Taylor]. The need is to do for knowledge work and knowledge worker what Taylor, beginning almost a century ago, did for manual work and the manual worker.''...Yikes.
Now, `knowledge work' and `knowledge worker' sound an awful lot like the sort of thing that goes on at a university. And working with knowledge - acquiring, understanding, refining, teaching, or creating it - sounds a lot like the sort of thing one considers when one thinks about ...intelligence.
Objective measures of intelligence, and directing improvement of society as a consequence, are also ideas which trace their roots to the scientific optimism of the 19th century. They have, however, become classic cases where the built-in measuring bias has had tragic consequences.
In statistics we teach that every measuring system has three sources of potential bias and variation - the instrument or gauge, the method used to conduct the measurement, and the persons who actually do the measuring. Considerable effort has to be spent on each of these to reduce the bias and variation in the measuring system before even hoping to act on the basis of the measured results.
Experience with IQ suggests the validity of intelligence measures to be inherently problematic. If something is being measured, it is doubtful that it is what we would agree to call `intelligence'.
Now, a university is a collection of individuals whose common interest is this so-called `knowledge work.' Like the individual humans involved, the collection is essentially a living breathing organism. How much more difficult, then, to define valid measures of its merit? Moreover, since such measures are intended to steer behaviour, the organism measured will naturally respond. This kind of feedback adds another level of complexity to the measuring. A sure sign that the measuring system has a validity problem is that the organism can improve the measured value by taking actions which would not generally be considered to be improvements in merit.
But I'm sure other speakers will address this in more detail.
Back to the future.