Taylor and Weber brought statistics to management.  Unfortunately the approach also often engendered an unhealthy and unproductive chasm between the new management positions it implied and the workers it no longer asked to think.

Taylor, Weber and others taught us to develop logical and statistical blueprints of work that rationality pounds into efficiency and productivity.

Unfortunately, these philosophies arguably engendered a significant portion of the union movement in the early 20th century, pitting the worker and the manager on opposite ends of a spectrum that destroys innovation and synergy and does not inherently find legitimacy in any organization. No team can be effective when it is split down the middle or harbors adversarial emotion. Much of the legendary works by Drucker in the decades since then consciously form a response to the negative effects of this hierarchical paradigm.

Later we learned that informal social relationships within every organization evolve that have as much or more to do with successful outcomes as the blueprints Taylor taught us to produce. We began investigating matrices, and empowerment, and currently a great deal of research centers on complex networks and differential status structures.  Deming taught us to stop focusing so much on discrete tasks, as Taylor espoused, and measure the total system.  The early adopting Japanese developed a significant manufacturing advantage as a result.

The challenge made here is that the blueprint is not yet quite squarely on-center.  It is missing key pieces of the puzzle that other disciplines have identified as crucial, whether they are the maturation and effectiveness of organisms, innovative free markets, or emergent complex systems.

We shall return to the individual. We shall investigate the model of the individual maturing in a complex, non-linear world and review what we learned in the past hundreds of years about what that means. We shall start at the beginning.