It’s easy to forget that the way so many of us work today is new. But early knowledge work was still quite different from our modern professional lifestyle. The approach to cognitive work that Mr. Rheingans’s “radical” plan seeks to upend, in other words, is at best 10 to 20 years old. Complex components like the magnetos were still constructed by hand by a single skilled worker at a stationary work bench. By 1914, after Ford instituted the continuous-flow assembly line supported by specialized tools, this time dropped to only 93 minutes.

Source: New York Times November 06, 2019 11:01 UTC