Frederick Winslow Taylor

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Frederick Winslow Taylor bigraphy, stories - American engineer and management consultant

Frederick Winslow Taylor : biography

March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915

Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) 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. Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.

Publications

Taylor published many articles and short monographs. A selection:

  • 1894. Notes on Belting
  • 1895. A Piece-rate System
  • 1896. The adjustment of wages to efficiency; three papers …. New York, For the American economic association by the Macmillan company; London, S. Sonnenschein & co..
  • 1903. Shop management; a paper read before the American society of mechanical engineers. New York.
  • 1906. On the art of cutting metals, by Mr. F. W. Taylor; an address made at the opening of the annual meeting in New York, December 1906. New York, The American society of mechanical engineers.
  • 1911. Principles of Scientific Management. New York and London, Harper & brothers.
  • 1911. Shop management, by Frederick Winslow Taylor … with an introduction by Henry R. Towne …. New York, London, Harper & Brothers.
  • 1911. A treatise on concrete, plain and reinforced: materials, construction, and design of concrete and reinforced concrete. (2d ed). New York, J. Wiley & sons.
  • 1912. Concrete costs. New York, J. Wiley & sons.

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,

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.

Future US 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 argued that railroads, when governed according to Taylor’s principles, 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.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

Taylor believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans specifying the job, and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and communicated to the workers.Rinehart, J.W. The Tyranny of Work, Canadian Social Problems Series, Academic Press Canada (1975), p. 44. ISBN 0-7747-3029-3

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 laborer was worthy of his hire, and pay was linked to productivity. His workers were able to earn substantially more than those under conventional management,. and this earned him enemies among the owners of factories where scientific management was not in use.