Most of our ideas about process improvement come from a factory analogy – which was Invented by Frederick W. Taylor at the beginning of the 20th century. His idea was that you separate the work into independent roles, then each person owns one single step of the process. It is the role of management to own the process; people are simply a cog in a great big factory.
And, for 1911, it was pretty good. It made Ford a billionaire, and that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Now, think about the assembly line. More later …