Sublime

Jim is what I call a rugged individualist. His brand of individualism comes straight out of the philosophy of the Enlightenment era, the writings of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the same philosophical roots as the American Revolution and soon after that the French Revolution. Gone forever was the doctrine of the divine right of kings. It got repla

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

Steering

continuous processing, the mechanization of unreliable hand processes, and John Hall’s style of reconceiving a process down through the finest-grained of production details. British visitors to American steel plants were astonished—not just at their scale and speed but by the “very conspicuous absence of labourers.”

Walker soon became disgusted by Frémont’s self-promoting histrionics and rank cowardice in the field – a combination he found particularly loathsome. They

Jim Hill worked incessantly at improving every aspect of the railroad’s structure and operation. He traveled back and forth along the line in his business car, looking for dips and bumps and spying out curves that could be straightened and grades that could be lessened. More than any other railroad leader of the day, he had an engineer’s passion fo

Where Ford’s approach was driven by practical matters, Taylor’s approach was more scientific in nature, giving rise to the term “scientific management.” In layperson’s terms, where Ford treated people like cogs in a machine, Taylor approached workers as if they were machines themselves—machines that could be optimized for maximum efficiency, given

Andrew Taggart, who writes about our modern relationship to work, describes as “a first-person work‑centric story of progress about an individual’s life course.”⁠