Taylorism

Taylorism — Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” — appears in Kyle’s corpus mainly as the historical origin point of the management-consulting industry. In Bonfire of the Consultancies, Lionel Barber traces consulting’s lineage back to Taylorism, noting that it “even found support in the Soviet Union”: Lenin and Trotsky eventually embraced it, contracting the US consultant Walter Polakov for advice on the first five-year plan. Barber uses this to frame how the discipline grew into a $900B-a-year global industry that “has largely escaped blame for the sins of modern capitalism,” with McKinsey becoming “as synonymous with managerial reform as Hoover is with vacuum cleaning.”

The deeper treatment of the underlying method lives on the canonical page Scientific Management, where (via Reinventing Knowledge — From Alexandria To The Internet) Taylor is the movement’s “guru,” remembered for the 1911 maxim “In the past, the man has been first; in the future the system must be first,” and where the thread runs on through the Gilbreths and NASA’s Space Age Management. This page captures the consulting-history angle specifically.

Context: Taylorism, formalized in Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), sought to optimize labor through time-and-motion study, standardized procedures, and management control of work design — deeply shaping 20th-century industrial organization and, eventually, the management-consulting profession.

Where this appears

• Bonfire of the Consultancies — Taylorism cited as the historical origin of consulting, including the Lenin/Trotsky/Polakov Soviet anecdote
• Lionel Barber — the essay’s author, who threads Taylorism into his history of the consulting industry
• Scientific Management — the canonical page on Taylor’s method