Frederick Taylor's "scientific management" was all the rage when fascism and totalitarianism was on the rise in the 1920s–30s. It sounded good — people with pertinent knowledge and skills would occupy positions in logically designed organizations in which those qualities would be optimally employed. In practice, the most common quality of scientifically managed firms was intense dissatisfaction among their workers. That's mostly because, in reality, people's family, political connections, and willingness to "play ball" with the powerful and wealthy overshadowed everything else when it came to filling positions. That's why the purest expressions of scientific management — communist countries —...