Gilbreth’s lesson, still fresh today, is that incentives alone are not enough. One must reexamine each aspect of product and process, casting aside the comfortable assumption that everyone knows what they are doing. Today, this approach to information flows and business processes is sometimes called “reengineering” or “business-process transformation.” Whatever it is called, the underlying principle is that improvements come from reexamining the details of how work is done, not just from cost controls or incentives.
