Simon Head "The Rise of the Reengineers"

In this chapter from The New Ruthless Economy, Simon Head explains the work of William Leffingwell whose name often gets overshadowed by his predecessor, Frederick Taylor. After benefitting from the generational gap between the two, Leffingwell followed in Taylor’s footsteps and successfully created the system of scientific management. Head explains scientific management (also called Taylorism throughout the reading) as a theory of management that analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Head states that it was clear that in Leffingwell’s books Office Management: Principles and Practice, Textbook of Office Management, and Better Office Management he followed Taylor’s language, however, he never loses the perspective of the industrial engineer and his ambition was to always have an office run as much like a factory as possible (Head 61). Although Leffingwell’s process of scientific management was successful for many years, the influence of technology allowed this “theory” to grow and shape into the system of reengineering.

Simon Head is a scholar at the Institute of Public Knowledge at New York University and is an Associate Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford. His impressive track record of his participation in many elite organizations and his extensive knowledge in the world of technology is evident in his writing. He delivers facts with a critical eye allowing for the reader to make personal judgments about these systems. In “The Rise of the Reengineers”, Head speaks about how technology influenced a shift from scientific management to reengineering. Give the title of the book “The New Ruthless Economy” it is not secret that Head is against how current society’s workflows are negatively affecting today’s economy. As Head states, “reengineering has become a synonym for the practice of scientific management in the contemporary service economy” (Head 68). This has become similar to the shift from Taylor’s ideas to Leffingwell’s more concrete system of scientific management, illustrating how idea’s improving over a generational gap is not a new theme in history.

With technology improving, reengineering took over. One person could now accomplish a task that used to take a couple people hours to complete, in a shorter amount of time and further causing man to become dehumanized to the machine’s powers. What Head doesn’t make implicitly clear in this chapter is that he is very against computer led systems thinking and reengineering. In Head’s book Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans, he describes how such machines have led to misindustrialization in which service workers emotions are manipulated to optimize retail sales. He is concerned by the machines that are used in large corporations  (i.e. database systems, workflow management systems, etc) and further given to senior management leading him to constantly pose the question of “What are the regimes under which these systems operate”.

I thought that Head was concise in how he presented his ideas and spoke his ideas clearly to the reader. However, I wish we could’ve read another chapter in this book because I wanted to see his more critical view on why this type of workflow is negative and why he is against today’s economy.