If you’ve given up on The New Yorker‘s coverage of business management due to excessive Gladwellization (the latest work by North America’s greatest thinker asks “Is football any better than dogfighting?” and uses 9 full pages to show that in both activities there are likely to be injuries), reading “Not So Fast” may restore your faith in the magazine. This piece by Jill Lepore covers the early days of management consulting and business education. The most interesting part is the second half, which concerns the life of Lillian Gilbreth, mother of 12 children, Ph.D. in Psychology, author of several pioneering books on scientific management, and inspiration for the movie “Cheaper by the Dozen.” She had done a lot of her work under her husband’s name and when he died in 1924 found that businesses would not pay for advice from a woman-run enterprise. Despite her lack of any experience or competence in the kitchen, she remade herself into a home economics expert and died at the age of 93 in Scottsdale, Arizona in 1972 (before Phoenix sprawled out to swallow it!).
More: read the full text of the article
I applaud his economy! He once took 320 pages to explain that
in order to be really, really good at something, one had to work
really, really hard.
On a separate note, since I once crafted a makeshift baking
pan out of tinfoil, I hope you’ll nominate me for the Nobel
Prize in Metallurgy.
Vaguely related article on women tested for the 1960s NASA space program: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2009-10-14-astronauts-women_N.htm
The New Yorker Outloud podcast with Jill Lepore about the piece is also good. I was surprised, though, since I had started the article and got bored with it and put it down –obviously before it got to the stuff about Gilbreth.