The concept of management as a specific body of knowledge and practice forming the basis of a specialised profession ... Wherever human activities ar… - Lyndall Fownes Urwick

If they (the ) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands.

It is this detachment, this use of comparison, his faith in the possibility of applying scientific processes of thought to the organisation of industry, which constitute Babbage's unique contribution to the advancement of management. More than half a century before Taylor was to illuminate the same point, with far greater effect because he was a practising engineer, Babbage had stumbled on the underlying truth that there are general principles applicable to the manufacture of products by machinery, and that it is an understanding of these principles rather than the technical knowledge of how to make a particular article which is of the first importance.

At the present time administration is more an art than a science; in fact there are those who assert dogmatically that it can never be anything else. They draw no hope from the fact that metallurgy, for example, was completely an art several centuries before it became primarily a science and commenced its great forward strides after generations of intermittent advance and decline.