Idea 18 - Empowerment The history of modern business practice began with 'scientific management', which wanted the very opposite of empowerment. Until then, each skilled workman had done his job in his own idiosyncratic fashion. Scientific management's Frederick W. Taylor insisted that they drop all that and carry out the task in the 'one best way', which had been measured and timed to perfection. Empowerment just wasn't in it for Taylor, though he did introduce one small vent for self-expression - the suggestion box. The history of empowerment in the workplace has, in a way, simply been a journey back to the status quo ante. Its history is not lengthy. In 1977, when Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote Men and Women of the Corporation, a study of power and the role of women in a large organization, there still didn't seem to be much of it about. The book was in the vanguard of a movement to give employees some discretion over their work (a reasonable defi...