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Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 to March 21, 1915) was an American engineer who 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.
Life
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 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 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 influenced by Taylor's writing, 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:
- Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
- Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
- Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.
- 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.
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. Neverthless, 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 (Jaffe 1957:34).
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 (Jaffe 1957:36-40; Nelson 1980:181-184)
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