Frederick W.

Taylor
Taylor (Frederick Winslow Taylor - March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915), was an American
mechanical engineer who originally sought to improve industrial efficiency. A management
consultant in his later years, he is sometimes called "the father of scientific
management." He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his
ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.

Taylor was also an accomplished tennis player. He won the first doubles tournament in the
1881 U.S. National Championships (later called the US Open), with Clarence Clark.

Life of Frederick Taylor

Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. He
wanted to attend Harvard University, but poor eyesight forced him to consider an
alternative career. In 1874, he became an apprentice patternmaker, gaining shop-floor
experience that would inform the rest of his career. He obtained a degree in Mechanical
Engineering through a highly unusual (for the time) series of correspondence courses at the
Stevens Institute of Technology where he was a Brother of the Gamma Chapter of Theta Xi,
graduating in 1883 (Kanigel 1997:182-183,199). He began developing his management
philosophies during his time at the Midvale Steel Works, where he rose to be chief engineer
for the plant. Later, at Bethlehem Steel, he and Maunsel White (with a team of assistants)
developed high speed steel. He eventually became a professor at the Tuck School of
Business at Dartmouth College.

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.

Louis Brandeis, who was an active propagandist of Taylorism (Montgomery 1989: 250),
coined the term scientific management in the course of his argument for the Eastern Rate
Case, which Taylor used in the title of his monograph The Principles of Scientific
Management, published in 1911. His 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
 Scientific Management and Frederick Winslow Taylor
By far the most influential person of the time and someone who has had an impact on
management service practice as well as on management thought up to the present day, was
F. W. Taylor. Taylor formalized the principles of scientific management, and the fact-
finding approach put forward and largely adopted was a replacement for what had been the
old rule of thumb.

He also developed a theory of organizations which altered the personalized autocracy which
had only been tempered by varying degrees of benevolence, such as in the Quaker family
businesses of Cadbury's and Clark's.

Taylor was not the originator of many of his ideas, but was a pragmatist with the ability to
synthesize the work of others and promote them effectively to a ready and eager audience
of industrial managers who were striving to find new or improved ways to increase
performance.

At the time of Taylor's work, a typical manager would have very little contact with the
activities of the factory. Generally, a foreman would be given the total responsibility for
producing goods demanded by the salesman. Under these conditions, workmen used what
tools they had or could get and adopted methods that suited their own style of work.

F.W. Taylor's contributions to scientific management

By 1881 Taylor had published a paper that turned the cutting of metal into a science. Later
he turned his attention to shoveling coal. By experimenting with different designs of shovel
for use with different material, (from 'rice' coal to ore,) he was able to design shovels that
would permit the worker to shovel for the whole day.

In so doing, he reduced the number of people shoveling at the Bethlehem Steel Works from
500 to 140. This work, and his studies on the handling of pig iron, greatly contributed to the
analysis of work design and gave rise to method study.

To follow, in 1895, were papers on incentive schemes. A piece rate system on production
management in shop management, and later, in 1909, he published the book for which he
is best known, Principles of Scientific Management.

A feature of Taylor's work was stop-watch timing as the basis of observations. However,
unlike the early activities of Perronet and others, he started to break the timings down into
elements and it was he who coined the term 'time study'.

Taylor's uncompromising attitude in developing and installing his ideas caused him much
criticism. Scientific method, he advocated, could be applied to all problems and applied just
as much to managers as workers. In his own words he explained:

"The old fashioned dictator does not exist under Scientific Management. The man at
the head of the business under Scientific Management is governed by rules and laws
which have been developed through hundreds of experiments just as much as the
workman is, and the standards developed are equitable."

Taylor's contribution to organizational theory

This required an organization theory similar for all practical purposes to that advocated by
those organizational theorists who followed. These theorists developed principles of
management, which included much of Taylor's philosophy

His framework for organization was:

• clear delineation of authority

• responsibility
• separation of planning from operations
• incentive schemes for workers
• management by exception
• task specialization

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." (Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, cited by
Montgomery 1989:229, italics with Taylor)

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." (Montgomery 1989:251)

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.

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."
Management theory

Taylor thought that by analysing 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....

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 Era.

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...

Taylor's influence

Taylor's influence on 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.

Taylor's influence on 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...(Fayol, 1987, p. 43)." 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 (p. 44)." Fayol criticized Taylor's functional management in this way. “…
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…(Fayol, 1949, p. 68.)” Those
eight, Fayol said, 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. This, he said, was an unworkable situation, and that Taylor must have
somehow reconciled the dichotomy in some way not described in Taylor's works.

Taylor's influence on Switzerland

In Switzerland, the American Edward Albert Filene established the International

Management Institute to spread information about management techniques.

Taylor's influence on 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." (Atta 1986: 335). 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. (Atta 1986: 331). 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 which are continuously improved.

"The easy availability of replacement labor, which allowed Taylor to choose only 'first-class
men,' was an important condition for his system's success." (Atta 1986: 329) 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."

Taylor and his theories are also referenced (and put to practice) in the 1921 dystopian novel
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin.

Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific
Management, in which he described how the application of the scientific method to the
management of workers greatly could improve productivity. Scientific management methods
called for optimizing the way that tasks were performed and simplifying the jobs enough so
that workers could be trained to perform their specialized sequence of motions in the one
"best" way.

Prior to scientific management, work was performed by skilled craftsmen who had learned
their jobs in lengthy apprenticeships. They made their own decisions about how their job
was to be performed. Scientific management took away much of this autonomy and
converted skilled crafts into a series of simplified jobs that could be performed by unskilled
workers who easily could be trained for the tasks.

Taylor became interested in improving worker productivity early in his career when he
observed gross inefficiencies during his contact with steel workers.

Soldiering
Working in the steel industry, Taylor had observed the phenomenon of workers' purposely
operating well below their capacity, that is, soldiering. Frederick Taylor attributed soldiering
to three causes:

1. The almost universally held belief among workers that if they became more
productive, fewer of them would be needed and jobs would be eliminated.
2. Non-incentive wage systems encourage low productivity if the employee will receive
the same pay regardless of how much is produced, assuming the employee can
convince the employer that the slow pace really is a good pace for the job.
Employees take great care never to work at a good pace for fear that this faster pace
would become the new standard. If employees are paid by the quantity they
produce, they fear that management will decrease their per-unit pay if the quantity
increases.
3. Workers waste much of their effort by relying on rule-of-thumb methods rather than
on optimal work methods that can be determined by scientific study of the task.

To counter soldiering and to improve efficiency, Taylor began to conduct experiments to

determine the best level of performance for certain jobs, and what was necessary to achieve
this performance.

Time Studies

Taylor argued that even the most basic, mindless tasks could be planned in a way that
dramatically would increase productivity, and that scientific management of the work was
more effective than the "initiative and incentive" method of motivating workers. The
initiative and incentive method offered an incentive to increase productivity but placed the
responsibility on the worker to figure out how to do it.

To scientifically determine the optimal way to perform a job, Taylor performed experiments
that he called time studies, (also known as time and motion studies). These studies were
characterized by the use of a stopwatch to time a worker's sequence of motions, with the
goal of determining the one best way to perform a job.

The following are examples of some of the time-and-motion studies that were performed by
Taylor and others in the era of scientific management.

Pig Iron

If workers were moving 12 1/2 tons of pig iron per day and they could be incentivized to try
to move 47 1/2 tons per day, left to their own wits they probably would become exhausted
after a few hours and fail to reach their goal. However, by first conducting experiments to
determine the amount of resting that was necessary, the worker's manager could determine
the optimal timing of lifting and resting so that the worker could move the 47 1/2 tons per
day without tiring.

Not all workers were physically capable of moving 47 1/2 tons per day; perhaps only 1/8 of
the pig iron handlers were capable of doing so. While these 1/8 were not extraordinary
people who were highly prized by society, their physical capabilities were well-suited to
moving pig iron. This example suggests that workers should be selected according to how
well they are suited for a particular job.

The Science of Shoveling

In another study of the "science of shoveling", Taylor ran time studies to determine that the
optimal weight that a worker should lift in a shovel was 21 pounds. Since there is a wide
range of densities of materials, the shovel should be sized so that it would hold 21 pounds
of the substance being shoveled. The firm provided the workers with optimal shovels. The
result was a three to four fold increase in productivity and workers were rewarded with pay
increases. Prior to scientific management, workers used their own shovels and rarely had
the optimal one for the job.

Bricklaying

Others performed experiments that focused on specific motions, such as Gilbreth's

bricklaying experiments that resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of motions
required to lay bricks. The husband and wife Gilbreth team used motion picture technology
to study the motions of the workers in some of their experiments.

Taylor's 4 Principles of Scientific Management

After years of various experiments to determine optimal work methods, Taylor proposed the
following four principles of scientific management:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the
tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving
them to train themselves.
3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are
being followed.
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.

These principles were implemented in many factories, often increasing productivity by a

factor of three or more. Henry Ford applied Taylor's principles in his automobile factories,
and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and
motion studies.

Drawbacks of Scientific Management

While scientific management principles improved productivity and had a substantial impact
on industry, they also increased the monotony of work. The core job dimensions of skill
variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback all were missing from the
picture of scientific management.
While in many cases the new ways of working were accepted by the workers, in some cases
they were not. The use of stopwatches often was a protested issue and led to a strike at one
factory where "Taylorism" was being tested. Complaints that Taylorism was dehumanizing
led to an investigation by the United States Congress. Despite its controversy, scientific
management changed the way that work was done, and forms of it continue to be used
today.

References

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor

http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/

http://accel-team.com/scientific/scientific_02.html