{"id":522,"date":"2010-04-25T12:36:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T16:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/?p=522"},"modified":"2010-04-28T08:32:45","modified_gmt":"2010-04-28T12:32:45","slug":"general-semantics-h-l-gantt-how-productivity-engineering-overlaps-with-alfred-korzybskis-foundational-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/2010\/04\/25\/general-semantics-h-l-gantt-how-productivity-engineering-overlaps-with-alfred-korzybskis-foundational-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"General Semantics & H.L. Gantt: How Productivity Engineering Overlaps with Alfred Korzybski’s Foundational Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the back of\u00a0his first book Manhood of Humanity<\/em>, Alfred Korzybski gives commendable credit to H.L. Gantt.\u00a0 For example, on page 261, in the essay in Appendix III titled “Engineering and Time-Binding,” Korzybski writes:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

We are the masters of our own destinies, the responsibility is ours to correct the mistakes of our ancestors and to establish a scientific philosophy, scientifically true laws, scientfically true ethics, and a scientific sociology, which will form one unified science of man and his function in the universe, a science which I propose to call “Human Engineering.” Gantt’s methods would be the first practical application toward this end.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Earlier in the essay Korzybski seems to clarify that his\u00a0acquaintance with Gantt was post-mortem, though urgent.\u00a0 (Update:<\/strong> See Note 1<\/a>.)\u00a0 Korzybski writes on page 256:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

Upon the completion of this book I was astonished that there are such a small number of engineers who have the intuitive feeling of the greatness of the assets at their command and of the gravity of their liabilities concerning affairs of humanity.\u00a0 I was eager to have my book read and analysed by a few leading engineers.\u00a0 The late H. L. Gantt being no more with us, I then turned to Walter N. Polakov, Doctor of Engineering […]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These two names–Gantt and Polakov–are of interest, as the latter introduced me to the former, and when I read the former, his ideas resonated synchronously with a notion I’d had in my head only about an evening before.\u00a0 Both Gantt’s and Polakov’s writings give tremendous perspective on Korzybski’s ideas in the journey toward founding general semantics, and they provide hearty evidence that in founding general semantics, Korzybski was aiming at human behaviors that were not subjectively<\/em> bad, but bad relative to<\/em> the goal of human productivity and human progress.\u00a0 Therefore, as a field, general semantics is dedicated to human productivity and this goal explains much of the value system expressed in general semantics.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The synchronous notion I had was voiced around a sushi table of members of the New York Society for General Semantics<\/a> this past month.\u00a0 The topic had something to do with money, and the conversation triggered a thought I’d had of late that I’d not yet aired.\u00a0 It was something like this:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

It seems to me misguided to say that business is about money, that the goal of business is to make money.\u00a0 Instead, it seems to me that the goal of business is to service, and money is compensation for service.\u00a0 To teach or preach that the goal of business is to make money is to take one’s eye off the more important goal to service.<\/p>\n

As support for this position, think of a new community just formed of a few people.\u00a0 In this community, businesses form to provide service for the community.\u00a0 They receive compensation for their service.\u00a0 If they take a profit, this profit is intended for reinvestment in the business in order for the business to provide service better for the community.\u00a0 When profit is not intended for reinvestment in the business and instead profit is intended to be\u00a0pocketed by individuals at the business, we call this situation “greed.”\u00a0 That is, greed is the saving of money against the purpose of investing in service.<\/p>\n

To champion that business is about making money is to champion greed.\u00a0 And to champion greed is to champion an antisocial attitude.\u00a0 Businesses, by the story I give above, are designed to serve the society, so in this respect they are prosocial.\u00a0 When they fail to provide service, and when they become strictly money-making operations, they cease to behave prosocially and start to become antisocial, because rather than contributing to the society, they are taking away from it.<\/p>\n

This said, business is not<\/em> about making money.\u00a0 Business is about service<\/em>.\u00a0 Money is compensation<\/em> for service.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My first experience of this attitude came years ago when I had my first major negative encounters with tech support that had been directed to India.\u00a0 I was finding that in talking to these tech support people, I couldn’t express myself as I would to someone in my home city or country.\u00a0 As a result, the tech support person in India couldn’t truly understand the problem I was having.\u00a0 The person was not from New\u00a0 York City so didn’t know what was going on in New York City.\u00a0 The person didn’t understand my idioms and other kinds of expressions.\u00a0 In transferring tech support jobs to India, because of the communication hurdles introduced,\u00a0businesses were actually downgrading <\/em>my tech support service.\u00a0 The motive for these kinds of transfers, as explained in the news, was cost-savings.\u00a0 But it was cost-savings that yielded\u00a0depreciated service.\u00a0 It was hard to believe that these cost-savings were for reinvestment in the business because if the business proclaims it is “about service,” the palpable depreciation of service would be reason to stop the international transfer of service.<\/p>\n

In voicing my lobster-rollicking perspective, deep-seated I had some thought that it was a juvenile and overly simplistic take on business, that my idealized example was no reflection of how business may have evolved as a concept or should behave in a society.\u00a0 But the next day I got to reading Gantt’s book Organizing for Work<\/em>, which I’d downloaded in PDF form from Google Books for free<\/a>\u00a0for my Kindle.\u00a0 I don’t recall where, but I’d read a reference to the book within general semantics literature, and it sounded like something I should read.\u00a0 It was true: It was something I should have read.\u00a0 About half of the book is of interest to the person interested in the business ideas I articulated, as well as the ideas Korzybski expressed in Manhood of Humanity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

At the time after World War I, there seems to have been a boom in thought about what the war taught.\u00a0 In Organizing for Work<\/em>, published in 1919,\u00a0Gantt demonstrates how wealth means little and productivity means lots.\u00a0 Gantt explains how a rich country may lose a war if it’s unable to produce.\u00a0 As a simple example, say that you’re a rich country about to head into war, and you need 1 million bombs by next month.\u00a0 If you do not have the factories that can produce your order, your\u00a0wealth means next to nothing as you won’t possibly get your 1 million bombs by next month.\u00a0 But now consider the flipside: If you have the factories that can produce your order, you can generate 1 million bombs by next month and apply those bombs toward war.\u00a0 Your wealth aided in the endeavor, for sure, but it was not the more important factor.\u00a0 The more important factor was your factories–that is, your ability to produce.<\/p>\n

This is to say, the important factor is the service businesses provide.\u00a0 If businesses have a lot of money but little ability to produce, their contribution to society is highly questionable.\u00a0 And their existence<\/em>, it would seem, is for the contribution to society.\u00a0 Without a contribution to society, their very existence, it would seem, is\u00a0highly questionable.<\/p>\n

The above thoughts are more recollections and ideas gleaned from Gantt’s book more than a week later rather than direct quotations.\u00a0 For those, we can look to a number of the beginning chapters of his short, well-written book.<\/p>\n

Page v:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

In order to resume our advance toward the development of an unconquerable democratic civilization, we must purge our economic system of all autocratic practices of whatever kind, and return to the democratic principle of rendering service, which was the basis of its wonderful growth.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By “autocratic practices,” he refers to monopolistic price-gouging, the Walmartization of business in a community.\u00a0 We’ll understand his phrasing a bit better in just a bit.\u00a0 But more to the honor of service, Gantt kicks off page 1 with:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

Modern civilization is dependent for its existence absolutely upon the proper functioning of the industrial and business system.\u00a0 If the industrial and business system fails to function properly in any important particular, such, for instance, as transportation, or the mining of coal, the large cities will in a short time run short of food, and industry throughout the country will be brought to a standstill for lack of power.<\/p>\n

It is thus clearly seen that the maintenance of our modern civilization is dependent absolutely upon the service it gets from its industrial and business system.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In various other places Gantt stresses the prioritization of service.\u00a0 But service\u00a0over what?\u00a0 We get an answer on pages 4-5:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

Such was the normal and natural growth of business and industry which obtained its profits because of its superior service.\u00a0 Toward the latter part of the nineteenth century it was discovered that a relatively small number of factories, or industrial units, had replaced the numerous mechanics with their little shops, such as the village shoemaker and the village wheelwright, who made shoes and wagons for the community, and that the community at large was dependent upon the relatively smaller number of larger establishments in each industry.<\/p>\n

Under these conditions it was but natural that a new class of business man should arise who realized that if all the plants in any industry were combined under one control, the community would have to accept such service as it was willing to offer, and pay the price which it demanded.\u00a0 In other words,\u00a0it was clearly realized that if such combinations could be made to cover a large enough field, they would no longer need to serve the community but could force the community to do their bidding.\u00a0 The Sherman Anti-Trust Law was the first attempt to curb this tendency.\u00a0 It was, howerver, successful only\u00a0to a\u00a0very limited extent, for the idea that the profits of a business were justified only on account of the service it rendered was rapidly giving way to one in which profits took the first place and service the second.\u00a0 This idea has grown so rapidly and has become so firmly imbedded in the mind of\u00a0the business man of today, that it is inconceivable to many leader of big business that it is possible to operate a business system on the lines along which our present system grew up; namely, that its first aim should be to render service.<\/p>\n

It is this conflict of ideals which is the source of the confusion into which the world now seems to be driving headlong.\u00a0 The community needs service first, regardless of who gets the profits, because its life depends upon the service it gets.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pardon the length of that quote, but it’s pretty powerful.\u00a0 And scathing.\u00a0 And it even explains why I don’t care about money so much.<\/p>\n

Myself, I tend to put service over payment.\u00a0 I webmaster for a number of people and organizations, and other than a few rare occasions when money was given to me without request, I expressly do not work for money in webmastering and do not accept it in webmastering.\u00a0 I am providing a free service, and my service is not contigent on financial compensation.\u00a0 I am compensated in what I learn from the experience, not in money.\u00a0 I take an interest in what my service provides for the other person, or the community around the website I webmaster.\u00a0 I put the community’s needs over my needs.\u00a0 This is not to say I don’t look out for my needs–I’ll protect my time and energy when I need to–but in critical times, I may forego my needs for the needs of others.\u00a0 I am prosocial in this respect, to the slight detriment of my selfishness.<\/p>\n

But that would seem to be “bad business” according to the mindset that financially motivated businesspeople champion.\u00a0 In that mindset, since business is “about making money,” there is no service if there is not money to be made in the service.\u00a0 If the service serves the community or society in some way, it’s tough luck if there’s no money to be made in it because to these types of businesspeople, it’s not worth doing.\u00a0 That is, if these businesspeople can’t pursue their greed, the business is not worth it to them.\u00a0 “Fuck society.”<\/p>\n

Of course, it’s not that simple or crude, but in some sense, it is<\/em> that simple and crude.\u00a0 And that’s also probably why my mindset of service is so confusing to people.\u00a0 Several people in my life seem bewildered that I’d “volunteer” my time as I do to do something that seems to them should receive financial compensation.\u00a0 In these endeavors, what is more important to me is that the job is done, and the job isn’t contingent on whether I’m paid or not.\u00a0 Granted, I might have an arrangement wherein I get paid hourly so in these cases I may be disinclined to work if there’s not going to be compensation, but those arrangements might be said to be somewhat antisocial.\u00a0 A more prosocial arrangement is compensation for service rendered.\u00a0 It would be like\u00a0compensating a worker for the number of widgets he produces, and\/or compensating a worker for the number of bonus<\/em> widgets he produces.\u00a0 When the widgets are immaterial–such as the creation of copy, the development of strategy, the devising of implementation–compensation is harder to measure, but that’s a bit beside the point and not all that hard to address.\u00a0 The point is that service is key, and it’s keyer than key; it’s not that making money is keyer than key.<\/p>\n

I will probably touch more on Gantt in later posts because what brilliant clarity he shines on the evolution of general semantics is spectacular.\u00a0 For now, I will move back to Korzybski.\u00a0 H.L. Gantt was an engineer.\u00a0 His\u00a0steel was humans.\u00a0 A lot of his focus in at least his later years seemed to be on productivity of the worker in the workplace.\u00a0 He measured factory performance against factory targets and created charts for managers to quickly evaluate performance.\u00a0 He asked questions about the cost to businesses of idleness of workers and idleness of machines.\u00a0 He exalted the dimension of time, and he sought arrangements that maximized productivity.\u00a0 I haven’t done a lot of research into Gantt yet, but this is what I understand to date.<\/p>\n

His interests were a lot like Korzybski’s.\u00a0 Korzybski was also an engineer.\u00a0 His\u00a0steel was humans.\u00a0 Korzybski was interested in productivity, but that interest was largely left unsaid as he talked in terms of progress.\u00a0 I offer this equation to correlate productivity and progress, Gantt and Koryzbski:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>\n

progress =
\nadditional productivity over expected productivity =
\nadditional productivity \/ expected productivity<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is, progress is a ratio in terms of productivity, and you have progress when you produce more than what you expect to produce.\u00a0 Humanity, as Korzybski notes, progresses relative to animals.\u00a0 Animals theoretically just produce.\u00a0 Humans progress.\u00a0 Humans’ capacity for progress comes from its ability to cooperate with dead humans in order to learn from their mistakes and not repeat the past mistakes in presentday production.\u00a0 Animals can’t do that; they can’t cooperate with dead animals, and they are forced to make the same mistakes past animals made.\u00a0 Korzybski called humans’ capacity “time-binding,” meaning the cooperation of humans from different time periods.\u00a0 Animals did not have the time-binding capacity and merely had “space-binding” capacities–the capacity to cooperate with animals in the same space and time.<\/p>\n

Korzybski regarded the observation of humans’ time-binding capacity as “scientific” because it was observable on a macroscopic scale.\u00a0 Personally, I’ve long thought of Korzybski’s time-binding idea as more creative than scientific, but putting it in the frame of productivity engineering makes a helluva difference for me in seeing Korzybski’s point and agreeing to a large extent with his notion of it as a distinguishing factor of humanity.\u00a0 While humans to me are still appropriately classified as animals, they are definitely a dramatically different sort of animal and, in engineering, they\u00a0probably should not be strictly thought of as animals.\u00a0 They aren’t your housepets, your buggy pullers, or your pest controllers.\u00a0 They’re something less predictable and more capable.\u00a0 As a species, they are tremendous relative to other animals.\u00a0 They’re not just productive; humans are progressive<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Of the value system expressed in Manhood of Humanity<\/em> and later in Korzybski’s Science and Sanity<\/em>, cast against the screen of productivity engineering, these values are not simply Korzybski’s values but the values many an engineer would probably take in the endeavor to engineer a more productive human.\u00a0 Korzybski’s approach in later years was to look at language (as well as thinking) to see how it influenced technological progress and advancement.\u00a0 He saw in Einstein shifts in thinking and language that led to better understandings and gross technological progress.\u00a0 He fascinated in those subtle shifts that yielded dramatic consequences.\u00a0 And given his endeavor to afford progress, he touted them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Korzybski could have taught others to focus on other aspects that affected human progress, but it wasn’t his “calling”: His was to look at language and thinking.\u00a0 And his criticism of language and criticism of thinking is not of a cantankerous, eccentric man but of a disciplined\u00a0engineer troubled by the unnecessary blockades inhibiting progress toward building a more productive, a progressive, human being.<\/p>\n

NOTES<\/strong>
\n<\/a>
\n1. According to Alfred Korzybski biographer Bruce Kodish in an email to me dated 4\/27\/2010, Korzybski’s acquaintance with Gantt was not<\/em> “post-mortem.” Bruce writes:<\/p>\n

‘<\/span><\/div>

Korzybski met Gantt in 1919 before he wrote Manhood. Gantt was part of a whole [milieu] in NYC that Korz. was involved with after the war and that influenced Korzybski […]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t verify this statement at the moment but I presume in writing a biography on Korzybski, Bruce has support for this claim and I trust his take.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the back of\u00a0his first book Manhood of Humanity, Alfred Korzybski gives commendable credit to H.L. Gantt.\u00a0 For example, on page 261, in the essay in Appendix III titled “Engineering and Time-Binding,” Korzybski writes: ‘We are the masters of our own destinies, the responsibility is ours to correct the mistakes of our ancestors and to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[63,30,17,64,34,38,61,35,33,60,31,62,29],"class_list":["post-522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-semantics","tag-engineering","tag-gantt-chart","tag-goals","tag-h-l-gantt","tag-kindle","tag-manhood-of-humanity","tag-nysgs","tag-pdf","tag-productivity","tag-progress","tag-time-binding","tag-values","tag-walter-polakov"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=522"}],"version-history":[{"count":56,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":577,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/522\/revisions\/577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benhauck.com\/offthemap\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}