Management's View of Research and Development

fashioned the first stone hatchet, he undoubtedly boasted to his wife that he had solved the problem of productivity for all time. It was just the beginning. The next important invention relating to productivity was probably the whip. Down through the Simon Legree era this was considered the ultimate tool for stimulating productivity. When the industrial age came it was found that water or steam power was more productive than human or animal power. One of the prophets of that age, Edison, besides his genius for invention, had a slogan: "There is a way to do it better let's find it." Two famous men among many men who did "find it" were Henry Ford, who was alleged to have invented the assembly line, a milestone in productivity, and Gilbreth, hero of Cheaper by the Dozen, who demonstrated with his time-and-motion studies that more