1911 – Taylorism: A Philadelphia engineer named F.W. Taylor publishes The Principles of Scientific Management, a guide to increasing the efficiency of factory workers. His methods, known as Taylorism, dominate industrial work through much of the 20th century, from auto plants to McDonald's
1940 – Operations Research: Researchers in Britain and the U.S. build mathematical models of North Atlantic shipping lanes. Their goal: to find an optimized approach for getting convoys safely past Nazi U-boats. The result is operations research, a math discipline that now runs the logistis of the modern world including the development of cell-phone towers and helicopter routes in Iraq.
1950 – Statistical Process Control: W. Edward Deming begins teaching statistical management in Japan. His thesis: Meticulous control of quality also leads to lower costs. His methods contribute to startling advances in Japanese manifacturing which later spread through the world.
1986 – Six Sigma: Motorola institutes Six Sigma, a management strategy heavily influenced by Deming. It focuses on verifiable data, including consumer satisfaction and financial returns, It becomes the winning formula for GE and drives statistical managing into the ranks of office workers.
2005 – Modeling Workers: IBM embarks on research to harvest massive data on employees, and to build mathematical models of 50,000 of the company's consultants. The goal is to optimize them, using operations research, so that they can be deployed with ever more efficiency.
Source: Baker, S. "Management by numbers." BusinessWeek, September 8, 2008: pp. 32-38.