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Dehumanizing with AI, Automation, and Technical Optimization

The Practical Leader

In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor, used “Scientific Management” principles to make the new production lines more efficient. Workers became cogs in the machine; shut off their minds, shut their mouths, and did what engineers and managers told them to do. They had a massive turnover problem.

McGregor 101
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Business Does Not Need the Humanities — But Humans Do

Harvard Business Review

.” The anecdote was too delicious to ignore, seeming to capture all we (think we) know about Zuckerberg—his casual brilliance, his intense competitiveness, his hyper-rational faith in technology, and the polarizing effect of his compelling software. It went viral. It’s the one that they believe. There is No Team Machine.

Drucker 13
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The Renaissance We Need in Business Education

Harvard Business Review

Our brick institutions have in no way caught up with what today’s technologies make possible in terms of virtual learning and individualized, customized instruction. The scientific management emphasis on efficiency and profit at all costs can no longer take precedence over human values.

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Managing in an Age of Winner-Take-All

Harvard Business Review

Over the last 250 years, waves upon waves of scientific and engineering advances have brought about an accelerating rise in living standards that even the two deadliest wars in history could not reverse. The forces of technology and management will continue to hold equal sway as the 21st century unfolds.

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How IT Professionals Can Embrace the Serendipity Economy

Harvard Business Review

With Frederick''s Taylor invention of scientific management in the 1880s, and its subsequent assimilation into what we now consider modern management, organizations have used logic and rationality to the eliminate waste, to seek efficiency, and to transfer human knowledge to tools and processes. Serendipity into Performance.

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