SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 79, Issue 280, 29 November 1935, Page 6

SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT

MODERN DEVELOPMENTS. bome very impressive addreses were given at the sixth International Congress for Scientific Alanagement, held in London recently. Lord Eustace Percy said that the scientific management of industry meant nothing less than the or failure of Western civilisation. The greatest challenge to industry was a psychlogical chalcnge, and people did not feel the same way to-day as they used to feel. The prospect of profit in the sense of building up a fortune was no longer the same incentive to the mass ol their fellow-men as it was in the nineteenth century. The incentive of running a good job and producing wealth and distributing it as widely as possible to meet the greatest amount of need of the population as a whole was au incentive far more powerful to the young men and women of to-day than the older incentive was. On-e of the principal speakers was Dr. Howell Wilsdon, Director of Research, Wool Industries Research Association. “Whatever may be the field of our particular activities,” he said, “scientific management must be concern-ed with the interpretation of numerical data applicable to the articles of commerce. The data must be refined in order that they shall receive a communicable connotation and thereby become aceptable as tokens in commercial transactions. In this process of simplification a statistical procedure of some sort is inevitable, even if it is no more than the calculation of an arithmetic mean. It is worth our while to recognis’O the importance of this process since in further commercial transactions it tends to result in the substitution of quantitative description of goods for the actual goods. It is as though we based a paper currency nc-t on au absolute amount of refined gold but on assay certificates of gold ore. The exchange value of such a currency would depend on the confidence which can be placed on the sampling and assay of the ore as well as on its variability and amount.”