Frederick Winslow Taylor (20 March 1856–21 March 1915), widely known as F. W.

Taylor,
was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is
regarded as the father of scientific management, and was one of the first management
consultants.[1]
Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly
conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.
Biography
Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy Quaker family in Germantown, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. Taylor's ancestor, Samuel Taylor, settled in Burlington, New Jersey, in 1677.
Taylor's father, Franklin Taylor, a Princeton educated lawyer, built his wealth on mortgages.[2]
Taylor's mother, Emily Annette Taylor (née Winslow) was an ardent abolitionist and a coworker
with Lucretia Mott. Educated early by his mother, Taylor studied for two years in France and
Germany and traveled Europe for eighteen months.[3] In 1872, he entered Phillips Exeter
Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Upon graduation, Taylor was accepted at Harvard Law. However, due to rapidly deteriorating
eyesight, Taylor had to consider an alternative career. After the depression of 1873, Taylor
became an industrial apprentice patternmaker, gaining shop-floor experience at a pump-
manufacturing company Enterprise Hydraulic Works, Philadelphia. Taylor's career progressed in
1878 when he became a machine shop laborer at Midvale Steel Works. Taylor was promoted to
gang-boss, foreman, research director, and finally, chief engineer at Midvale. Taylor took night
study at Stevens Institute of Technology and in 1883 obtained a degree in Mechanical
Engineering through a highly unusual, for the time, series of correspondence courses.[4] While at
Stevens Institute of Technology, Taylor was a Brother of the Gamma Chapter of Theta Xi. On
May 3, 1884, he married Louise M. Spooner of Philadelphia.
From 1890 until 1893 Taylor worked as a general manager and a consulting engineer to
management for Manufacturing Investment Company, Philadelphia, a company that operated
large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin. In 1893, Taylor opened an independent consulting
practice in Philadelphia. His business card read "Systematizing Shop Management and
Manufacturing Costs a Specialty". In 1898, Taylor joined Bethlehem Steel, where he, Maunsel
White, and a team of assistants developed high speed steel. For his process of treating high speed
tool steels he received a personal gold medal at the Paris exposition in 1900, and was awarded
the Elliott Cresson Medal that same year by the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. Taylor was
forced to leave Bethlehem Steel in 1901 after antagonisms with other managers. In 1901,
Frederick and Louise Taylor adopted three orphans Kempton, Robert and Elizabeth.
On October 19, 1906, Taylor was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the
University of Pennsylvania.[5] Taylor eventually became a professor at the Tuck School of
Business at Dartmouth College.[6] Late winter of 1915 Taylor caught pneumonia and one day
after his fifty-ninth birthday, on March 21, he died. He was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery,
in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Work
Taylor was a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor is
regarded as the father of scientific management, and was one of the first management consultants
and director of a famous firm. In Peter Drucker's description,
Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic
observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of
affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries
well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or
perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been
added to them since - even though he has been dead all of sixty years.[7]
Taylor was also an accomplished tennis player, who won the first doubles tournament in the
1881 U.S. National Championships, the precursor of the U.S. Open, with Clarence Clark.[8]
[edit] Scientific management
Taylor believed that the industrial management of his day was amateurish, that management
could be formulated as an academic discipline, and that the best results would come from the
partnership between a trained and qualified management and a cooperative and innovative
workforce. Each side needed the other, and there was no need for trade unions.
Future U.S. Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis coined the term scientific management in the
course of his argument for the Eastern Rate Case before the Interstate Commerce Commission in
1910. Brandeis debated that railroads, when governed according to the principles of Taylor, did
not need to raise rates to increase wages. Taylor used Brandeis's term in the title of his
monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. The Eastern Rate Case
propelled Taylor's ideas to the forefront of the management agenda. Taylor wrote to Brandeis "I
have rarely seen a new movement started with such great momentum as you have given this
one." Taylor's approach is also often referred to, as Taylor's Principles, or frequently
disparagingly, as Taylorism. Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific
study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively
leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the
performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the
managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and
the workers actually perform the tasks.

[edit] Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and
working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of
enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.[9]
Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to
Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.
'I can say, without the slightest hesitation,' Taylor told a congressional committee, 'that the science of
handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is ... physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently
phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of
handling pig-iron.[10]
The introduction of his system was often resented by workers and provoked numerous strikes.
The strike at Watertown Arsenal led to the congressional investigation in 1912. Taylor believed
the labourer was worthy of his hire, and pay was linked to productivity. His workers were able to
earn substantially more than those in similar industries and this earned him enemies among the
owners of factories where scientific management was not in use.
[edit] Propaganda techniques
Taylor promised to reconcile labor and capital.
With the triumph of scientific management, unions would have nothing left to do, and they would have
been cleansed of their most evil feature: the restriction of output. To underscore this idea, Taylor
fashioned the myth that 'there has never been a strike of men working under scientific management',
trying to give it credibility by constant repetition. In similar fashion he incessantly linked his proposals to
shorter hours of work, without bothering to produce evidence of "Taylorized" firms that reduced working
hours, and he revised his famous tale of Schmidt carrying pig iron at Bethlehem Steel at least three times,
obscuring some aspects of his study and stressing others, so that each successive version made Schmidt's
exertions more impressive, more voluntary and more rewarding to him than the last. Unlike [Harrington]
Emerson, Taylor was not a charlatan, but his ideological message required the suppression of all evidence
of worker's dissent, of coercion, or of any human motives or aspirations other than those his vision of
progress could encompass.[11]

[edit] Management theory

Taylor thought that by analyzing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most
remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component
parts and measure each to the hundredth of a minute. One of his most famous studies involved
shovels. He noticed that workers used the same shovel for all materials. He determined that the
most effective load was 21½ lb, and found or designed shovels that for each material would
scoop up that amount. He was generally unsuccessful in getting his concepts applied and was
dismissed from Bethlehem Steel. It was largely through the efforts of his disciples (most notably
H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas. Nevertheless, the book he wrote after
parting company with Bethlehem Steel, Shop Management, sold well.
[edit] Relations with ASME
Taylor was president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) from 1906 to
1907. While president, he tried to implement his system into the management of the ASME but
was met with much resistance. He was only able to reorganize the publications department and
then only partially. He also forced out the ASME's long-time secretary, Morris L. Cooke, and
replaced him with Calvin W. Rice. His tenure as president was trouble-ridden and marked the
beginning of a period of internal dissension within the ASME during the Progressive Age.[12]
In 1912, Taylor collected a number of his articles into a book-length manuscript which he
submitted to the ASME for publication. The ASME formed an ad hoc committee to review the
text. The committee included Taylor allies such as James Mapes Dodge and Henry R. Towne.
The committee delegated the report to the editor of the American Machinist, Leon P. Alford.
Alford was a critic of the Taylor system and the report was negative. The committee modified
the report slightly, but accepted Alford's recommendation not to publish Taylor's book. Taylor
angrily withdrew the book and published Principles without ASME approval.[13]
[edit] Patents
Taylor authored 42 patents.[14]
[edit] Taylor's influence
[edit] United States
• Carl Barth helped Taylor to develop speed-and-feed-calculating slide rules to
a previously unknown level of usefulness. Similar aids are still used in
machine shops today. Barth became an early consultant on scientific
management and later taught at Harvard.
• H. L. Gantt developed the Gantt chart, a visual aid for scheduling tasks and
displaying the flow of work.
• Harrington Emerson introduced scientific management to the railroad
industry, and proposed the dichotomy of staff versus line employees, with the
former advising the latter.
• Morris Cooke adapted scientific management to educational and municipal
organizations.
• Hugo Münsterberg created industrial psychology.
• Lillian Gilbreth introduced psychology to management studies.
• Frank Gilbreth (husband of Lillian) discovered scientific management while
working in the construction industry, eventually developing motion studies
independently of Taylor. These logically complemented Taylor's time studies,
as time and motion are two sides of the efficiency improvement coin. The two
fields eventually became time and motion study.
• Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate
degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on
Taylor's scientific management.
• Harlow S. Person, as dean of Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Administration
and Finance, promoted the teaching of scientific management.
• James O. McKinsey, professor of accounting at the University of Chicago and
founder of the consulting firm bearing his name, advocated budgets as a
means of assuring accountability and of measuring performance.

[edit] France
In France, Le Chatelier translated Taylor's work and introduced scientific management
throughout government owned plants during World War I. This influenced the French theorist
Henri Fayol, whose 1916 Administration Industrielle et Générale emphasized organizational
structure in management. In the classic General and Industrial Management Fayol wrote that
"Taylor's approach differs from the one we have outlined in that he examines the firm from the
"bottom up." he starts with the most elemental units of activity – the workers' actions – then
studies the effects of their actions on productivity, devises new methods for making them more
efficient, and applies what he learns at lower levels to the hierarchy..."[15] He suggests that Taylor
has staff analysts and advisors working with individuals at lower levels of the organization to
identify the ways to improve efficiency. According to Fayol, the approach results in a "negation
of the principle of unity of command."[16] Fayol criticized Taylor's functional management in this
way: In Shop Management, Taylor said[17] « ... the most marked outward characteristics of
functional management lies in the fact that each workman, instead of coming in direct contact
with the management at one point only, ... receives his daily orders and help from eight different
bosses... these eight were (1) route clerks, (2) instruction card men, (3) cost and time clerks, (4)
gang bosses, (5) speed bosses, (6) inspectors, (7) repair bosses, and the (8) shop
disciplinarian. »[17] This, Fayol said, was an unworkable situation, and that Taylor must have
somehow reconciled the dichotomy in some way not described in Taylor's works.
[edit] Switzerland
In Switzerland, the American Edward Albert Filene established the International Management
Institute to spread information about management techniques.
[edit] USSR
In the USSR, Lenin was very impressed by Taylorism, which he and Stalin sought to incorporate
into Soviet manufacturing. Taylorism and the mass production methods of Henry Ford thus
became highly influential during the early years of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless "[...]
Frederick Taylor's methods have never really taken root in the Soviet Union.".[18] The
voluntaristic approach of the Stakhanovite movement in the 1930s of setting individual records
was diametrically opposed to Taylor's systematic approach and proved to be counter-productive.
[19]
The stop-and-go of the production process - workers having nothing to do at the beginning of
a month and 'storming' during illegal extra shifts at the end of the month - which prevailed even
in the 1980s had nothing to do with the successfully taylorized plants e.g. of Toyota which are
characterized by continuous production processes (heijunka) which are continuously improved
(kaizen).[20]
"The easy availability of replacement labor, which allowed Taylor to choose only 'first-class
men,' was an important condition for his system's success."[21] The situation in the Soviet Union
was very different. "Because work is so unrythmic, the rational manager will hire more workers
than he would need if supplies were even in order to have enough for storming. Because of the
continuing labor shortage, managers are happy to pay needed workers more than the norm, either
by issuing false job orders, assigning them to higher skill grades than they deserve on merit
criteria, giving them 'loose' piece rates, or making what is supposed to be 'incentive' pay, premia
for good work, effectively part of the normal wage. As Mary Mc Auley has suggested under
these circumstances piece rates are not an incentive wage, but a way of justifying giving workers
whatever they 'should' be getting, no matter what their pay is supposed to be according to the
official norms."[22]
Taylor and his theories are also referenced (and put to practice) in the 1921 dystopian novel We
by Yevgeny Zamyatin.