Frederick Winslow Taylor

Taylor learned management on the shop floor, not in a lecture hall. He joined Midvale Steel as a machine-shop laborer in 1878 [2]. He was promoted through the shop to chief engineer of the works [2]. He also earned a mechanical-engineering degree from Stevens Institute by home study, going in only to take the exams [3]. He built his ideas from what he saw on the floor. He watched men hold back their output on purpose, a habit he called soldiering [1].

He was a working manager and an inventor first, a theorist second. He ran real shops as chief engineer at Midvale and then as a consultant at Bethlehem Steel [2]. At Bethlehem he also developed his most profitable patent, a high-speed steel-cutting process [2]. In 1906 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers made him its president [3]. So his word is worth most on the basics of work. He knows how to measure it, how to pay for it, and how to run a shop. He is not summing up a research field. He is reporting what he built and ran.

Taylor gave his whole working life to the study of work. That puts him at the devoted end of the scale, not the end where a field is borrowed from another. His core belief was simple. He blamed low output on management, not on the worker. He split soldiering into two kinds. Natural soldiering is the plain wish to take it easy [1]. Systematic soldiering is deliberate, done to keep the boss from learning how fast the work can go [1]. His fix was to make the two sides pull together, so that the owner and the worker both come out ahead [1].

Taylor is also a divisive figure, and that matters for how much to trust him. Louis Brandeis coined the phrase “scientific management” during the 1910 Eastern Rate Case [2]. Taylor took the name reluctantly. He thought it sounded too academic [3]. Unions fought his system hard. The strike at the Watertown Arsenal led to a congressional investigation in 1912 [2]. His book makes the case for the system. It is not a fair review of it.

His word is worth less the farther you get from the shop floor. His most famous example is the “Schmidt” pig-iron story. Later scholars found real gaps between the story and the actual report [3]. His idea of the “first-class man” caused him years of trouble. At the hearings he kept explaining what it meant. He meant a man who was fit for a job and willing to do it, not a superman [3]. His functional-foreman scheme never caught on in practice [3]. Trust Taylor on where measured, planned work came from. Do not trust him on how far to take it.

Taylor founded scientific management. Before him, running a shop was a craft passed down by rule of thumb from one worker to the next. In The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) he set a new goal. Management should “secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee” [1]. The way to get there was to study the work itself. His first rule of management is to “develop a science for each element of a man’s work” [1]. That swapped tradition for measurement. It also made management something you could teach.

The main tools are his. His task idea is the root of every planned job that pays a bonus. Under it, the management plans each worker’s day at least one day ahead and writes out the instructions [1], then pays 30 to 100 percent above ordinary wages for finishing on time [1]. He added functional foremen, a split form of oversight [3]. He added the exception principle, where a manager sees only the results that fall outside the standard [3]. His first paper to the ASME, in 1895, proposed a piece-rate pay system [2].

His influence went well past the shop. His book Shop Management (1903) was the first text used to teach industrial management to college students [3]. He said his system could only be learned on the floor. Even so, he lectured at Harvard every winter from 1909 to 1914 [3], and he never took a fee [3]. He is regarded as the father of scientific management [2]. A century later, historians still rank him the most important management thinker of the twentieth century [3]. Much of the field that came after him grew up by agreeing or arguing with him.