Frederick W Taylor Hardly a competent workman can be found who does not devote a considerable amount of time to studying just how slowly he can work and still

convince his employer that he is going at a good pace. Frederick W. Taylor

American engineer and inventor

18561917

Breakthrough ideas

Scientific Management

Key book

The Principles of Scientific Management

The Ultimate Business Guru Book 226

Frederick Taylor (18561917) had a profound effect on the working world of the twentieth century and was a man of amazing versatility and brilliance. And yet,

his name is either not known, or regarded in a negative light. Taylor, the inventor of

what was known as Scientific Management, was the patron saint of mass production;

the champion of measurement and of control; the rich man who believed he knew

and understood life on the production line better than anyone.

Frederick Winslow Taylor grew up in Philadelphia. His family were affluent.

While a teenager he undertook the classic European tour. It was no whistle stop

breeze through the continent Taylors tour lasted three years. Aged eighteen, and back at home, Taylor apprenticed himself to a Philadelphia maker of steam pumps,

the Enterprise Hydraulic Works. (He didnt go to Harvard because of impaired eyesight, though he passed the entrance examination.) His next career move was to

the Midvale Steel Company, where he became chief engineer, and from there to

become general manager of the Manufacturing Investment Companys paper mills in Maine. In 1893 he moved to New York and began business as a consulting engineer

(the forerunner of the management consultant).

Taylor attended the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Stevens was a recently established engineering institute then under its first president,

Henry Morton. Morton aimed to upgrade mechanical engineering and emphasized a

broad-based curriculum that fitted Taylors wide range of skills. Taylor graduated in 1883. (Henry Gantt creator of the Gantt chart graduated from Stevens a year after Taylor.)

While working and studying, Taylor came up with a seemingly endless series of

inventions and innovations. He changed the rules of baseball so that pitchers threw

overarm rather than underarm and took out over 100 patents for his many and varied

ideas. He was also a tennis champion.

At the core of Taylors view of the working world was his theory of how working life could be made more productive and efficient. This was painfully

simple. Taylor was the first and purest believer in command and control. In his 1911

book, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor laid out his route to

improved performance:

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1. Find, say, 10 or 15 different men (preferably in as many separate establishments and different parts of the country) who are especially skillful

in doing the particular work analyzed.

2. Study the exact series of elementary operations or motions which each of these men uses in doing the work being investigated, as well as the

implements each man uses.

3. Study with a stopwatch the time required to make each of these elementary movements and then select the quickest way of doing each element of the

work.

4. Eliminate all false movements, slow movements and useless movements. 5. Collect into one series the quickest and best movements as well as the best implements. This minute examination of individual tasks became known as Scientific

Management. Having identified every single movement and action involved in doing

something, Taylor could determine the optimum time required to complete a task.

Armed with this information, the manager could determine whether a person was

doing the job well. In its essence, scientific management involves a complete mental revolution on the part of the working man engaged in any particular

establishment or industry a complete mental revolution on the part of these men as to their duties toward their work, toward their fellow men, and toward their

employees, Taylor wrote. The humble employee was regarded as a robotic automaton. Motivation came in

the form of piece work. Brutally speaking, our scheme does not ask any initiative in a man. We do not care for his initiative, said Taylor with typical frankness. Employees had to be told the optimum way to do a job and then they had to do it.

Each employee should receive every day clear-cut, definite instructions as to just what he is to do and how he is to do it, and these instructions should be exactly

carried out, whether they are right or wrong, Taylor advised. Not surprisingly this did not always go down well in 1911 the introduction of Taylors methods caused a strike at a munitions factory run by the army.

The man most associated with the application of Scientific Management was

Henry Ford (though this is a simplistic reading of Fords contribution see pp. 65 The Ultimate Business Guru Book 228

8). In his book, My Life and Work, Ford gave a chilling insight into the unforgiving

logic of Scientific Management. He calculated that the production of a Model T

required 7882 different operations. Of these 949 required strong, able-bodied, and practically physical perfect men and 3338 required ordinary physical strength. The remainder, said Ford, could be undertaken by women or older children and 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and 10 by blind men. Debased though it was, this was the logical conclusion of Scientific Management.

Taylor practised what he preached and applied his theories to every aspect of his

own life. One book about him noted: Taylors personality emerges with great clarity from his writings. His virtual obsession to control the environment around

him was expressed in everything he did; in his home life, his gardening, his golfing;

even his afternoon stroll was not a casual affair but something to be carefully

planned and rigidly followed. Nothing was left to chance if in any way chance could

be avoided. Every personal action was thought through carefully, all contingencies

considered, and steps taken to guard against extraneous developments. And when,

despite all precautions, something did occur to upset his plans he gave evidence of

great internal distress distress that sometimes expressed itself in blazing anger and sometimes in black brooding . . . one gets the impression of a rigid, insecure

personality, desperately afraid of the unknown and the unforeseen, able to face the

world with reasonable equanimity only if everything possible has been done to keep

the world in its place and to guard against anything that might upset his careful,

painstaking plans.1 And yet, there can be no doubting the impact of Taylors thinking on a wider audience. Mussolini and Lenin were admirers, but so were many thousands of

ordinary business people. Astonishingly, a talk by Taylor in New York in 1914

attracted an audience of 693000. Scientific management had an effect throughout the

world. A Japanese engineer translated The Principles of Scientific Management (in

Japan it became Secrets for Eliminating Futile Work and Increasing Production). In

Japan it was a bestseller a foretaste of the Japanese willingness to embrace the latest Western thinking.

Frederick W. Taylor 229

Right or wrong, moral or amoral, Taylors view of the future of industry was accurate. In the past the man was first. In the future the system will be first. he said, and so it proved. Central to this, however, was the role of managers. Scientific

management elevated the role of managers and negated the role of workers. Armed

with their scientifically gathered information, managers dictated terms. Science, not rule of thumb, said Taylor. The decisions of foremen based on experience and intuition were no longer considered to be important. Employees were not allowed to have any ideas or sense of responsibility. Their job was to simply to do their job

as delineated by the all-seeing and all-knowing manager.

This may appear to be management by dictatorship; management from another

time. And yet Taylors legacy lives on. Despite [the] obsolescence of Taylors premises, we retain the Taylor system, with all the detriments inherent in use of a

system which is based on obsolete premises. The most obvious and serious of these

detriments is the underemployment of the intelligence and creative capacity of

millions of human beings, says quality guru, Joseph Juran.2 Nowhere is this clearer than in the continuing prevalence of the belief that

measurement is the crucial part of a managers work. Obsessive measurement is a slippery slope. The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. That is OK as far as it goes, says Robert McNamara. The second step is to disregard that which cant be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what cant be measured easily really isnt important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what cant be easily measured really doesnt exist. That is suicide.3

A more positive slant on Taylors work is provided by Fortunes Tom Stewart in his book on Intellectual Capital not a subject one would expect Taylor to feature in. Taylorism . . . not only worked, but for many decades worked brilliantly, says Stewart. The essence of Taylorism isnt just drudgery, constant repetition, and narrow job descriptions. The genius of the man was to urge that management apply

knowledge as well as the lash: take complex work, apply brainpower to it, and find

ways to do it simpler, faster, better. It is fashionable to dump on Taylor, but

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important to remember that Scientific Management was a great leap forward, not

just in terms of productivity but also in terms of the dignity of labor.4 While it is difficult to accept that Taylor enhanced the dignity of labor, Stewarts point that Taylor was a creature of his times is worth remembering. His contribution was significant as it encouraged thinkers to consider the nature of work

and how best to manage people and resources. For the first time, thinkers began to

give serious consideration to work. While Taylors concepts are now usually regarded in a negative light, the originality of his insights and their importance are in

little doubt. While acknowledging Scientific Management as one of the great liberating, pioneering insights Peter Drucker identified its weak points in The Practice of Management: Scientific Management, despite all its worldly success, has not succeeded in solving the problem of managing worker and work. As so often

happens in the history of ideas, its insight is only half an insight. It has two blind

spots, one engineering and one philosophical. Drucker argued that the engineering defect is that to take apart and to put together are different things. To confuse the two is grossly unscientific. The other blemish, said Drucker, was to fail to recognize that planning and doing are separate parts of the same job; they are not separate jobs.5 That Taylorism lives on is undoubted. After the death of his heirs, the Stevens

Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, received around $ 10 million from

Taylors sizeable estate. In keeping with his principles, Taylor had stipulated how the Institute was to invest the money. Indeed, Taylor specified how much of the

income from share dividends could be reinvested. His plan covers the next 180 years

and could potentially amount to an $8.6 billion endowment.