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EPILOGUE: WASTE NOT

This year marks the one hundredth anniversary of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, first published in 1911. The movement for scientific management changed the course of the twentieth century by making possible the tremendous prosperity that we take for granted today. Taylor effectively invented what we now consider simply management: improving the efficiency of individual workers, management by exception (focusing only on unexpectedly good or bad results), standardizing work into tasks, the task-plus-bonus system of compensation, and—above all—the idea that work can be studied and improved through conscious effort. Taylor invented modern white-collar work that sees companies as systems that must be managed at more than the level of the individual. There is a reason all past management revolutions have been led by engineers: management is human systems engineering.

In 1911 Taylor wrote: “In the past, the man has been first; in the future, the system must be first.” Taylor’s prediction has come to pass. We are living in the world he imagined. And yet, the revolution that he unleashed has been—in many ways—too successful. Whereas Taylor preached science as a way of thinking, many people confused his message with the rigid techniques he advocated: time and motion studies, the differential piece-rate system, and—most galling of all—the idea that workers should be treated as little more than automatons. Many of these ideas proved extremely harmful and required the efforts of later theorists and managers to undo. Critically, lean manufacturing rediscovered the wisdom and initiative hidden in every factory worker and redirected Taylor’s notion of efficiency away from the individual task and toward the corporate organism as a whole. But each of these subsequent revolutions has embraced Taylor’s core idea that work can be studied scientifically and can be improved through a rigorous experimental approach.

In the twenty-first century, we face a new set of problems that Taylor could not have imagined. Our productive capacity greatly exceeds our ability to know what to build. Although there was a tremendous amount of invention and innovation in the early twentieth century, most of it was devoted to increasing the productivity of workers and machines in order to feed, clothe, and house the world’s population. Although that project is still incomplete, as the millions who live in poverty can attest, the solution to that problem is now strictly a political one. We have the capacity to build almost anything we can imagine. The big question of our time is not Can it be built? but Should it be built? This places us in an unusual historical moment: our future prosperity depends on the quality of our collective imaginations.

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In 1911, Taylor wrote:

A century on, what can we say about those words? On the one hand, they feel archaic. We of the twenty-first century are hyperaware of the importance of efficiency and the economic value of productivity gains. Our workplaces are—at least when it comes to the building of material objects—incredibly well organized compared with those of Taylor’s day.

On the other hand, Taylor’s words strike me as completely contemporary. For all of our vaunted efficiency in the making of things, our economy is still incredibly wasteful. This waste comes not from the inefficient organization of work but rather from working on the wrong things—and on an industrial scale. As Peter Drucker said, “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.”²

And yet we are doing the wrong things efficiently all the time. It is hard to come by a solid estimate of just how wasteful modern work is, but there is no shortage of anecdotes. In my consulting and travels talking about the Lean Startup, I hear the same message consistently from employees of companies big and small. In every industry we see endless stories of failed launches, ill-conceived projects, and large-batch death spirals. I consider this misuse of people’s time a criminally negligent waste of human creativity and potential.

What percentage of all this waste is preventable? I think a much larger proportion than we currently realize. Most people I meet believe that in their industry at least, projects fail for good reasons: projects are inherently risky, market conditions are unpredictable, “big company people” are intrinsically uncreative. Some believe that if we just slowed everything down and used a more careful process, we could reduce the failure rate by doing fewer projects of higher quality. Others believe that certain people have an innate gift of knowing the right thing to build. If we can find enough of these visionaries and virtuosos, our problems will be solved. These “solutions” were once considered state of the art in the nineteenth century, too, before people knew about modern management.

The requirements of an ever-faster world make these antique approaches unworkable, and so the blame for failed projects and businesses often is heaped on senior management, which is asked to do the impossible. Alternatively, the finger of blame is pointed at financial investors or the public markets for overemphasizing quick fixes and short-term results. We have plenty of blame to go around, but far too little theory to guide the actions of leaders and investors alike.

The Lean Startup movement stands in contrast to this hand-wringing. We believe that most forms of waste in innovation are preventable once their causes are understood. All that is required is that we change our collective mind-set concerning how this work is to be done.

It is insufficient to exhort workers to try harder. Our current problems are caused by trying too hard—at the wrong things. By focusing on functional efficiency, we lose sight of the real goal of innovation: to learn that which is currently unknown. As Deming taught, what matters is not setting quantitative goals but fixing the method by which those goals are attained. The Lean Startup movement stands for the principle that the scientific method can be brought to bear to answer the most pressing innovation question: How can we build a sustainable organization around a new set of products or services?