Consulting, Cinematic Utopia, and Organizational Restraints

Chapter 4 discusses Frank and Lillian Gilbreth’s understanding of media and the attempts at implementing their consulting model in the business world as a solution for tackling the crisis of corporate control. It describes the strong ties of their film-based motion studies to Montessori pedagogy and how their approach was used to train typewriter operators and employees in corporations. It outlines that for the Gilbreths media technology was more than a mere useful instrument for corporate consulting. They associated the new media of this period, and above all film, with utopian ideas about the efficacy of these new visual forms of representation. The chapter shows that in the corporate reality of a consulting project, these ideas could only be realized to a limited degree. Their approach was part of a whole series of other reform-oriented attempts that were introduced in what was at the time a corporate environment receptive to innovation.

Visualizing “Everything under the Sun”

Chapter 1 gives a detailed introduction to the book’s historical-epistemological perspective, a combination of approaches from business and media history, media archeology, German media theory, and social theory. First, it establishes a systematic approach to understand visual consulting knowledge as media boundary objects and as part of a historically emergent graphic media network. It looks at the genealogy of the static, kinetic, and calculative media devices that form the graphic media network. Second, it traces the popularization of visualization methods that were originally developed in disciplines such as statistics, engineering, physiology, and macroeconomics. It shows the utopian potential that was attributed to visualization devices, which were conceived as new modes of intuitive thinking. It describes how management in industrial and commercial firms increasingly made use of these graphic, photographic, and filmic techniques. The chapter shows how this connection leads to fundamental changes in business practices, which are characterized as a form of “visual management.”

Failing in Style

Chapter 5 focuses on the restructuring of the Berlin-based Auergesellschaft, one of the Gilbreths’ first consulting contracts, in which, from 1914 on, they began to implement their consulting method on a major scale. It charts the Gilbreths’ strategic use of sports studies from baseball and fencing to showcase their method to potential customers—which included the German military—and how they eventually acquired a long-term contract with the Auergesellschaft. It describes the installation of a central planning room and a charting department, as well as the implementation of visualization techniques, including route models and flow charts. It analyzes how such visualization devices were used to train workers, while also allowing Gilbreth to give lectures about his system to middle management, thereby legitimizing his consulting model. The failure of the restructuring process shows the gap produced between the aspirations of their method and the reality of their concrete consulting activity, but also the high value that media techniques were given in this process.

Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes the book’s goal of recovering the media history of consulting and determining what the global growth of consulting knowledge can tell us about the modern world. The time span of the investigation, from 1880 to 1930, covers three parallel developments, which lead to a fundamental transformation of industrial knowledge structures. First, there is the constitution of an independent form of managerial activity in industry. Second, there is the establishment of the field of corporate consulting. Third, there is the emergence of a series of visualization techniques after 1880, which are at the disposal of the first two spheres, management and corporate consulting. These three tropes lead to a new form of visual management that follows from oral and written forms of management. The introduction describes the interdisciplinary approach the author adopts to trace the visual culture and historical epistemology of business consulting and consulting knowledge between media and business history and theory.

Visual Culture and Consulting

This chapter introduces the concept of visual management and shows how visual charting, simulation devices, and calculation devices were used in business organizations. It describes the installation of planning and charting rooms, centralized spaces in which business data were collated and visualized. With this, different scenarios could be devised, graphically compared, and interpolated into the future. This form of visual management enabled a fast reaction to production disruptions, which needed to be facilitated in planning processes and accounting. Corporate consultants such as Harrington Emerson or Frederick W. Taylor designed and described the fundamental methods of accounting and refined manufacturing norms on the factory floor. Visual aids such as logarithmic slide rules and nomographic machine cards became standard practice in the regulation of machines in factory-floor production routines. Gantt charts facilitated the coordination of interlinked production processes.

Conclusion

The Conclusion sums up the key issues of the book. It characterizes media and business consulting as a historically emergent relation between loose and solid coupling. It shows how business consultants strategically use “new media” to create new services or rebrand existing offers. In the context of business consulting and management, media techniques and apparatuses function as discursive channels for factors that were until then incapable of being articulated or represented. The graphic media network translated the heterogeneous fields of management and consulting into a loose visual coupling: the basic prerequisite for the definition of generally valid concepts, and the formation of an accepted canon of managerial methods. This leads to a politics of consulting that shifts the power structures in society.

Gilbreth, Inc.

Chapter 3 focuses on the emergence of the consulting industry and discusses early visual consulting models. It describes them as intrinsic parts of marketing efforts undertaken by consulting companies to boost their business model. It specifically focuses on the case of the early corporate consulting firm Gilbreth, Inc., which developed its “lab-based consulting” approach, with a significant use of film and media, as the firm’s main unique selling proposition. Gilbreth, Inc. strategically used a broad range of different visualization techniques—including motion studies conducted in a laboratory setting—in order to separate themselves from other corporate consultants, such as Harrington Emerson and Frederick Taylor. They communicated this in a broadly conceived marketing campaign, which in turn has relevance for the development of management theory and practice, since it popularized a specific model of business leadership among a wider expert audience.