Jumping the Gun.

--- victoriatangoman wrote:
> --- In spacesettlers@yahoogroups.com, "Bill"
> wrote:
> > Many of the manufacturing workers require very
> little knowledge of
> > what, they are producing.
>
> You mean like the steelworkers who control the
> minimills and each
> worker today has the productivity of 100 men from
> 1900.
Interesting you bring up steelworkers right now. I am
currently reading a great book called "Organizational
Communication IMperatives, Lessons of the Space
Program" by Phillip K. Tompkins and he looks at this
very fact. This book was written in the early 90s and
concludes a look at Marshal Space Flight Center
starting at 1967. One of the comparisons he uses in
this book is a look at Nucor.

Nucor was a steel company that existed with only 4
levels of management over thousands of employees. It
also was able to resist the powerful steelworkers
unions. The rason for this is they worked on a
philosophy that everyone was a responsible worker.
They tended to place factories in the midwest and hire
people who were good with machines, people who could
think for themselves and fix things as they broke. As
a result, they did pretty good.

The point here comes down to the douglas mcgregor's
theory x vs theory y argument of motivation theory.
If you believe that workers like to be told what to
do, theory x, then they will only do what they want to
do. However, inpower the worker to think for
themselves, theory y, and you will get more productive
workers.

For a better look at this see:
http://www.accel-team.com/human_relations/hrels_03_mcgregor.html

- Ryan Z

p.s. Tango, if you haven't read that book already, I
highly recommend it. Its a quick read (less than 200
pages) and gives good insight to one of the greatest
of the space visionaries, Werner Van Braun.