She starts her article by stating:
"Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.” Everyone there—including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in “Cheaper by the Dozen”—had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years."
The essence of the tale is that Brandeis sitting on a regulatory body which controlled the monopoly like rates of railroads had gotten enthralled with the less than scientific work of Taylor and the Gilbreths. He then saw that railroads should employ these new management techniques and then lower their rates. Simple, except as Lepore states the Taylor results were a fraud! Perhaps there is a lesson here for global warming, telephone interconnection rates and the like. Brandeis was a brilliant legal scholar, however he had no expertise in the area of actually running a company. He did however understand the "books" and as such used this profitably in his law practice. Yet the Taylor approach assumed you looked forward and not backward, that you understood the business and not the records of what happened. Brandeis was a lawyer at heart, as such he always looked backward.
Let me introduce an example.
When I was at NYNEX, now Verizon, in 1989 we had a strike. One of my management people went to strike duty in a customer service bureau. In that bureau, true to Taylor like management, there was a clock and you were timed for every customer contact and you were pressured to make them as short as possible. This manager went there and since he outranked the manager of the bureau he decided to try another tactic. He recognized that people call customer service because they have a problem.
Thus this customer contact was an opportunity to solve the problem, create a happy customer, get customer loyalty, get a word of mouth positive word about the company and even possibly sell more services. He reasoned that the longer the customer service call the better and the primary objective was to make a happy customer. A novel thought especially for a utility. He tried it and surprise it worked. Except for one thing, the system rejected it. The antibodies of the old telephone company attacked and said, "We do not do it this way." Well you know the result.
What is the relationship between this and Brandeis, well Brandeis accepted the "scientific" evidence without and justification, something he would never have done in court. Why did he do this, Lepore seems to believe it was an effect of the times. I would agree but it was also that Brandeis like so many well educated people believe that they can extend well beyond their ken with impunity.
The Lepore article is a review of a book, for which she writes:
"In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. As it happens, Stewart did the same things during his seven years as a management consultant; fudging, lying, and inflating, he says, are the profession’s stock-in-trade. Stewart had just finished a D.Phil. at Oxford in philosophy when he took a job rigging spreadsheets to tell companies whose business he barely understood how to trim costs, and he feels sullied by it."
This statement clearly shows that Brandeis was easily fooled by the Taylor forces, and that furthermore the consultants that flow to industry from our "best" business schools are oftentimes ignorant of what they opine upon and even worse they are conjurers of falsehoods created to meet certain expectations, perhaps on the part of the client. I have seen many of the top consulting firms send in twenty year old who I had to educate, if such was even possible, and then get them to write in English, all for $500 per hour or more.
Lepore then jumps to the present and she states:
"Much of Stewart’s account is devoted to following the anti-Taylor and neo-Taylor theories that have determined the curriculum at business schools in the course of the past century. He pays special attention to human-factors science and follows through several chapters the work of Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, whose early books “Competitive Strategy” (1980) and “Competitive Advantage” (1985) launched a field known as strategic management. (I should perhaps mention that, in the late eighties, Porter was my boss. His phone rang off the hook, and I, a temporary secretary, had the job of answering it.) To Stewart, strategic management is scientific management, without the stopwatch. And, along with much else taught in business schools, and everything that goes on in management-consulting firms, “it contributes to a misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity.”
Business schools have been indicted before. Earning an M.B.A. has been found to have little correlation with later business success. Business isn’t a science, critics say; it’s a set of skills, best learned on the job. Some business schools, accused of teaching nothing so much as greed, now offer ethics courses. Stewart argues that this whole conversation, about people, production, wealth, and virtue, is a conversation about ethics, and is better had within a liberal-arts curriculum. His howl of frustration, after all those years spent living in hotels, peddling nonsense, and profiting by it, is loud and angry. It’s also only half the story."
The point here is quite telling. Professors like Porter take a simple idea which may have some merit and then use it as a template for solving everything including world hunger. Porter has recently authored a book using his wordy methods in the area of health care and in my opinion he would have spent his time more wisely working as a practical nurse at Mt Auburn Hospital for a year of two.
Now back to Brandeis. Whereas Lepore is well written, insightful, clear, perceptive, the recent biography of Brandeis by Urofsky is at the other extreme. The subject of the book is compelling. Each sentence is well written yet each paragraph jumps from thought to thought in a cacophony of words. The book is virtually unreadable. He jumps back and forth so as to give the reader a migraine.
In addition Urofsky addresses the two issues, the Taylor issue and the Privacy issue with the slightest of a touch. The Taylor issue as Lepore states is a truly groundbreaking issues as regards to the courts and judicial thinking. It is one of the first ways in which "scientific" results were introduced into the legal system. Taylor was an "expert" and his results were left unquestioned. In many ways this was one of Brandeis' lowest moments, he failed to do to science what it does to itself, and what is at the core of the legal system as well, adversarial analyses.
Secondly the classic work on Privacy Warren and Brandeis state:
"It is our purpose to consider whether the existing law affords a principle which can properly be invoked to protect the privacy of the individual; and, if it does, what the nature and extent of such protection is."
They then go on to develop the basis of privacy in a well presented case. Regrettably when Brandeis was later to face this issue on the Court he did not confront it with the vigor of this paper. In fact the issue of privacy as a right seems still to be held at arms length except for women's rights. One would suspect that such is rather one sided. (See my paper on privacy, Privacy in the Internet).
The authors, Warren and Brandeis, then state:
"Gradually the scope of these legal rights broadened; and now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life--the right to be let alone, the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges; and the term "property" has grown to comprise every form of possession-- intangible, as well as tangible."
The "right to be left alone" is in many ways a unique American right, which we unfortunately have abandoned. The Government has become more intrusive regarding what we do, say, how we do things, how we interact. There once was a time one could live alone, not the Government intrudes on what Warren and Brandeis saw as a right. This fundamental paper seems to be glossed over at best by Urofsky. It is a pity. Whereas Lepore sees through the fog and makes it clear, Urofsky takes clarity as in the above quote and obfuscates it.
Brandeis had massive strengths and several failings. The Taylor case is a major failing indeed. It sets forth a pattern of Government intervention of at best weak grounds. However the "right to be left alone" was a brilliant insight into what makes America great. Pity is has been neglected and abused.
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