Henry Laurence Gantt

The Gantt Chart Thinker

Henry Laurence Gantt's (1861-1919) most popular legacy
to management was the Gantt Chart. Accepted as a
commonplace project management tool today, it was an
innovation of worldwide importance in the 1920s. But the
Chart was not Gantt's only legacy; he was also a
forerunner of the Human Relations School of management
and an early spokesman for the social responsibility of
business.
Life and career

Henry Gantt was born into a family of prosperous farmers

in Maryland in 1861. His early years, however, were
marked by some deprivation as the Civil War brought about
changes to the family fortunes. He graduated from Johns
Hopkins College in 1880 and was a teacher before
becoming a draughtsman in 1884 and qualifying as a
mechanical engineer. From 1887 to 1893 he worked at the
Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia, where he became
Assistant to the Chief Engineer (Fredrick W. Taylor) and
then Superintendent of the Casting Department.
Gantt and Taylor worked well in their early years together
and Gantt followed Taylor to Simonds Rolling Company
and on to Bethlehem Steel. From 1900 Gantt became well
known in his own right as a successful consultant as he
developed interests in broader, even conflicting, aspects of
management. In 1917 he accepted a government
commission to contribute to the war effort in the Frankford
Arsenal and for the Emergency Fleet Corporation.
Gantt's contribution

1.The task and bonus system

Gantts task and bonus wage system was introduced in
1901 as a variation on Taylors differential piece-rate
system. With Gantts system, the employee received a
bonus in addition to his regular day rate if he accomplished
the task for the day; he would still receive the day rate even
if the task was not completed.
As a result of introducing Gantts system, which enabled
workers to earn a living while learning to increase their
efficiency, production often more than doubled. This
convinced Gantt that concern for the worker and employee
morale was one of the most important factors in
management.
2.The perspective of the worker

Gantt realized that his system offered little incentive to do

more than just meet the standard. He subsequently
modified it to pay according to time allowed, plus a
percentage of that time if the task were completed in that
time or less. Hence a worker could receive three hours pay
for doing a two-hour job in two hours or less. But here
Gantt brought in an innovation, by paying the foreman a
bonus if all the workers met the required standard. This
constituted one of the earliest recorded attempts to reward
the foreman for teaching workers to improve the way they
worked.
3.The chart

Gantt's Bar Chart started as a humble but effective

mechanism for recording the progress of workers towards
the task standard. A daily record was kept for each worker -
in black, if he met the standard, in red, if he didn't. This
expanded into further charts on quantity of work per
machines, quantity of work per worker, cost control and
other subjects.
It was whilst grappling with the problem of tracking all the
various tasks and activities of government departments on
the war effort in 1917, that Gantt realized he should be
scheduling on the basis of time and not on quantities. His
solution was a bar chart which showed how work was
scheduled over time through to its completion. This
enabled management to see, in graphic form, how well
work was progressing, and indicated when and where
action would be necessary to keep on time.
4.The social responsibility of business

After the death of Taylor in 1915, Gantt seemed to distance

himself further from the core principles of scientific
management and extended his management interests to
the function of leadership and the role of the firm itself. As
his thinking developed, he believed increasingly that
management had obligations to the community at large,
and that the profitable organization had a duty towards the
welfare of society.
In Organizing for work, he argued that there was a conflict
between profits and service, and that the businessman who
says that profits are more important than the service he
renders 'has forgotten that his business system had a
foundation in service, and as far as the community is
concerned has no reason for existence except the service it
can render.' These concerns led him to assert that: 'the
business system must accept its social responsibility and
devote itself primarily to service, or the community will
ultimately make the attempt to take it over in order to
operate it in its own interest.'
Whatever we do must be in accord with human nature. We
cannot drive people; we must direct their
development....the general policy of the past has been to
drive; but the era of force must give way to that of
knowledge, and the policy of the future will be to teach and
lead, to the advantage of all concerned'.

-Henry Laurence Gantt