Jon Smart

This is the 13th blog post in the Organising for Outcomes  series. It is helpful to understand where we’ve come from, how today’s ways of working have evolved, and the context that those ways of working evolved in. This helps us to understand why we’re working the way we’re working and what we might want to change in today’s context, which is significantly different compared to previous technology-led revolutions.  In previous posts we looked at the growth of Systematic Management between...

Myth : Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations (1776) was the first to write about division of labour. There's just one problem: Adam Smith never set foot in a pin factory. In fact we need to go back 3 steps to Jean-Rodolphe Perronet in the 1740s, the only person in this story to have actually visited a pin factory!  Image of a pin factory, Diderot's Encyclopédie (1755) (1) Adam Smith (1776): The Economist Smith's description of a pin factory in The Wealth of Nations (1776) introduces the...

In this post we'll take a deeper dive into three broad themes of Systematic Management, introduced between 1870 to 1900: Specialisation, Centralisation and Data.