Lillian Moller, veuve Gilbreth (Treize à la douzaine)

[JacquesL]

Décédée à 93 ans, le 2 janvier 1972, Lillian Gilbreth est l'héroïne centrale de "Treize à la douzaine" (Cheaper by the Dozen), porté deux fois à l'écran, et de "Six filles à marier" (Belles on Their Toes) moins populaire, mais tout aussi savoureux, qui commence après la mort de Frank Gilbreth, en 1924.

http://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/gilbreth.html

LILLIAN MOLLER GILBRETH
Born: Oakland, California, May 24, 1878
Died: Phoenix, Arizona, January 2, 1972
Mother of Modern Management

Lillian Gilbreth was the mother of modern management. Together with her husband Frank, she pioneered industrial management techniques still in use today. She was one of the first "superwomen" to combine a career with her home life. She was a prolific author, the recipient of many honorary degrees, and the mother of 12. She is perhaps best remembered for motherhood. Her children wrote the popular books Cheaper by the Dozen and Belles on Their Toes about their experiences growing up with such a large and famous family. But Lillian Moller Gilbreth was not only a mother; she was an engineer and an industrial psychologist.

Lillian excelled in high school and decided that she wanted to study literature and music. Her father did not believe in higher education for women. He felt they needed only enough knowledge to manage a home gracefully. But Lillian persuaded him to let her attend the University of California at Berkeley while living at home and maintaining her family duties. When she obtained her B.A. in literature in 1900, she was the first woman to speak at a University of California commencement.

She went to Columbia, but illness forced a return to California after her first year. Undaunted, she went back to Berkeley and received a master's degree in literature in 1902. She celebrated by planning a vacation. She spent some time in Boston before embarking, and there she met her future husband.

Frank Gilbreth, who never went to college, was interested in efficiency in the workplace. His enthusiasm for the subject was contagious. He proposed to Lillian Moller three weeks after her return from Europe, and together they began their study of scientific management principles. Frank started a consulting business and Lillian worked at his side. They began their family and in 1910 moved to Rhode Island, where Gilbreth took her doctorate in psychology at Brown University in 1915--with four young children in tow at the ceremony.

But where Frank was concerned with the technical aspects of worker efficiency, Lillian was concerned with the human aspects of time management. Her ideas were not widely adopted during her lifetime, but they indicated the direction that modern management would take. She recognized that workers are motivated by indirect incentives (among which she included money) and direct incentives, such as job satisfaction. Her work with Frank helped create job standardization, incentive wage-plans, and job simplification. Finally, she was among the first to recognize the effects of fatigue and stress on time management.

Lillian Gilbreth continued her work alone after Frank's death in 1924. In 1926, she became the first woman member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. She went to Purdue in 1935 as a professor of management and the first female professor in the engineering school. In her consulting business, she worked with GE and other firms to improve the design of kitchens and household appliances. She even created new techniques to help disabled women accomplish common household tasks.

She did not retire from professional work until she was in her 80s. She traveled widely, speaking and writing about management issues. In 1966, she won the Hoover Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers. She died at the age of 92, the recipient of more than a dozen honorary degrees. Her ability to combine a career and family led to her being called, by the California Monthly in 1944, "a genius in the art of living."

The Gilbreths (United States, 1868-1972)

The Gilbreths are a husband and wife team that made an important contribution to indutrial management. They spanned the 19th and 20th century. Frank Bunker Gilbreth (1868-1924) was born in Fairfield, Maine. He began as a bricklayer. He then moved up to a building contractor and finally a management engineer. He sought to increase effiency in the industrial workforce. He became a lecturer at Purdue University. Frank and Lillian Evelyn Moller married in 1904. They went on to have 12 children. Frank unexpectedly died in 1924 leving his wife with 12 children including many young children to raise. Lillian Evelyn Moller (1878-1972) was born in Oakland, California. She graduated from the University of California with a B.A. and M.A. and went on to earn a Ph.D. from Brown University. With a large family to support she took over her their management consulting firm of Gilbreth, Inc. after the death of her husband. She also lectured at Perdue. The Gilbreths are best known to the general public as a result of the wonderful Clifton Webb film--"Cheaper by the Dozen" (U.S., 1950).

therblig

System that divides a task into a number of individual steps. The term was coined by US pioneers of the scientific management movement Frank Gilbreth and Lilian Gilbreth, who invented and refined the system between 1908 and 1924. The origins of the system were the motion studies the Gilbreths carried out on bricklayers.

Therblig is an anagram of Gilbreth. The method is useful for analysing the way a task is carried out to see if it can be performed more efficiently.

[JacquesL]

MARY PARKER FOLLETT,
1868–1933

A prophet before her time?
Follett was an American political scientist and management thinker who experienced a late and somewhat unexpected career as a management guru. In the 1920s she was well known on both sides of Atlantic, but her star was later eclipsed by the more masculine approaches that seemed to be better attuned with the Second World War era. The principles of democracy and cooperation permeate all Follett's writings, be they about politics, business or education. (Indeed, she thought that democratic principles should be taught from an early age.)
Follett theorised about community, experience and the group, and how these related to the individual and the organisation. A business, she reasoned, is a microcosm of human society. An organisation is one in which people at all levels should be motivated to work and participate. They should gather their own information, define their own roles and shape their own lives.
Organisations are based fundamentally on cooperation and coordination; this is the single unifying principle holding them together. She advocated 'power with' (a jointly developed power) rather than 'power over' as the key to social progress and business success – which did not suit the prevailing mood before, during and after the Second World War, but is much more in tune with recent management thinkers. Henry Mintzberg and Rosabeth Moss Kanter, for example, are fans of Follett's approach.

The following quotations serve as examples of Follett's ethos of management and resonate with today's ideas about organisational citizenship and the importance of employee involvement.
The ramifications of modern industry are too widespread, its organisation too complex, its problems too intricate for industry to be managed by commands from the top alone.
You must have an organisation which will permit interweaving all along the line ...
It is my plea above everything else that we learn how to cooperate ...
The leader knows that any lasting agreement among members of the group can come only by their sharing each others' experience.
The difference between competition and joint effort is the difference between a short and a long view.

Follett's theoretical emphasis on integration, synthesis and unifying differences and her work on group processes, crowd psychology, neighbourhood and work, governance and the self in relation to the whole now appear way ahead of their time. We should remember, however, that in the 1920s – before the spectre of war reared its head – she was received with empathy and understanding.
Her current resurrection is an indication of the relevance of such theories to many working environments today.

Further reading on Follett.

Graham, Pauline (ed.). Mary Parker Follett: Prophet of Management – A Celebration of Writings from the 1920s, Harvard Business School Press, 1995.
Tonn, Joan C. Mary P Follett: Creating Democracy, Transforming Management, Yale University Press, 2003.


http://www.employment-studies.co.uk/pdflibrary/a_tj0305.pdf

[JacquesL]

Autres liens sur Mary Parker Follett :

http://www.follettfoundation.org/mpf.htm



http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Parker_Follett
http://www.scribd.com/doc/2582318/Mary-Parker-Follett-Pionniere-du-management-Marc-Mousli

De mémoire, je cite Peter F. Drucker, qui présentant un travail à un professeur de management aux Etats Unis, obtint la réponse : "C'est ce que Mrs Parker Follett avait déjà publié vers telle date". Heu ? Jamais entendu parler, avoua Drucker.

[JacquesL]

Télécharger les oeuvres écrites de Mary Parker Follett :
http://mpfollett.ning.com/mpf/follett-writings

Follett Writings

Freedom and Coordination (Book, Collection of Lectures, 1949)
Freedom%20and%20Coordination%20-%20Cleaner%20Version.doc

Dynamic Administration (Book, Collected Papers, 1940)
Dynamic%20Admin.doc

The Teacher-Student Relation (Address, 1928)
The%20Teacher-Student%20Relation.doc

Creative Experience (Book, 1924)
Creative%20Experience.doc

Community is a Process (Article, 1919)
Community%20is%20a%20Process.pdf

Haldane introduction to The New State (1923)
Haldane%20Introduction.pdf

The New State (Book, 1918)
The%20New%20State.doc

Speaker of the House of Representatives (Book, 1896)
SpeakeroftheHouse.doc