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
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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
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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.