Before AI, before the knowledge economy, there was a man who decided workers should be treated like cogs in a machine.. and we’ve never quite escaped him

We rarely stop to consider how much of our daily lives has been shaped by the ideas of a few individuals. Locke helped lay the foundations of democracy. Fleming’s penicillin transformed medicine. Keynes reimagined modern economics.

And if you’ve ever worked in a corporation, another name has quietly shaped your professional life more than any other: Frederick Winslow Taylor

At the turn of the 20th century, the Industrial Revolution demanded new approaches to work. Manufacturing had long been an artisan craft, with knowledge passed from master to apprentice. Taylor disrupted this tradition. He broke tasks down into their smallest components, ran experiments to find the “one best way,” and created a system of scientific management.

Productivity soared, particularly during the World Wars, but at a cost. Taylorism cemented the factory as a machine and workers as cogs within it. Thought belonged to managers, action to employees. Hierarchies hardened, individuality was stripped away, and the idea that “first-class minds are born, not made” seeped into both industry and education. Carol Dweck’s work on mindset now challenges that belief, but its shadow lingers.

Taylorism had its moment. Today we live in a knowledge economy, where ideas are the raw material. In this context, rigid hierarchies stifle innovation. Those closest to the problem often hold the most creative solutions. What we need is not more standardisation, but a revival of the artisan’s craft,  where work is not stripped of humanity but becomes an expression of it

The very phrase human resources carries the residue of an age when people were treated as inputs to be managed. From the earliest factories, skills were hired rather than the person as a whole. This led to dissociation, even objectification.

Immanuel Kant argued that human beings have intrinsic worth that is not dependent on their usefulness or social standing. His principle was clear: treat people always as ends in themselves, never merely as means. To reduce someone to a tool for our purposes is to deny their dignity.

Since 2022, the rise of generative AI has reshaped knowledge work. Employers now prize soft skills, ethics, communication, leadership more than ever. Yet here lies a paradox: organisations often find the very individuality that fuels these skills disruptive to their systems.

As poet David Whyte writes in The Heart Aroused:
“Like water flowing from an underground spring, human creativity is the wellspring greening the desert of toil and effort, and much of what stifles us in the workplace is the immense unconscious effort on the part of individuals and organisations alike to dam its flow.”

Although HR today often focuses on wellbeing and employee experience, the very name still carries the residue of treating people as resources. Organisations have a duty to create systems that uphold dignity and unleash creativity, but the responsibility does not rest with them alone.

Work occupies 80,000 to 100,000 hours of a lifetime. It is one of the most demanding, revealing, and self-sacrificing endeavours we undertake. We may not always be free from our conditions, but as Viktor Frankl reminded us, we are always free to take a stand toward them. The challenge is not only for organisations to reimagine how they see us, but for us to reimagine how we see ourselves at work.

Individuality becomes most valuable not when it is paraded for its own sake, but when it is placed in service of something larger than the self. The future of work will depend as much on our courage to claim that freedom as it does on any corporate reform.

We’re busy working on a couple of new episodes, but in the meantime, why not explore the past ones? The Finding Meaning in Work podcast dives into conversations with people who’ve built lives and careers rooted in purpose. Guests include Simon Griffiths, Founder and CEO of Who Gives a Crap, who turned a simple idea into a global social enterprise; Fatuma and Laurinda Ndenzako of Collective Closets, reshaping Australian fashion through a celebration of African heritage and slow fashion; and Dr. Jason Fox, a self-described wizard-philosopher challenging the default metrics of modern work to spark curiosity and authentic progress