- Taylor opens by declaring the object of the whole system: “The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee” — and insists the two are not opposed but “one and the same” in the long run [1].
- The famous line usually quoted against him appears in the Introduction, in context: “In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first” — followed immediately by the claim that the first object of any good system “must be that of developing first-class men” [2].
- The enemy is “soldiering”: deliberate underwork. Taylor distinguishes the natural tendency — “the tendency of the average man (in all walks of life) is toward working at a slow, easy gait” — from systematic soldiering, in which men “deliberately work as slowly as they dare while they at the same time try to make those over them believe that they are working fast” [3].
- The system rests on four duties the management takes on: develop a science for each element of the work, “which replaces the old rule-of-thumb method”; scientifically select and then train the workman, “whereas in the past he chose his own work and trained himself as best he could”; heartily cooperate with the men so the work follows the science; and divide work and responsibility almost equally between management and workmen, the management taking “all work for which they are better fitted than the workmen” [4].
- The mechanism is “the task idea”: “The work of every workman is fully planned out by the management at least one day in advance,” with written instructions specifying what to do, how, and in what time — paired with a large wage premium for doing it [4].
- The worked examples carry the argument: the Bethlehem pig-iron experiment raises tonnage per man from 12 1/2 to 47 1/2 long tons at a 60 per cent wage premium; the shoveling study, bricklaying via Gilbreth’s motion study, and the metal-cutting experiments repeat the pattern of studying the work, selecting the worker, and paying for the pace [4].
The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor's 1911 monograph founding scientific management — the argument that every element of a workman's job can be studied, measured, and redesigned by the management, replacing rule-of-thumb methods and 'soldiering' with a science of work. Its four principles and its worked examples (pig-iron handling, shoveling, bricklaying) made it the first named system of management and the text the rest of the field grew up answering.
- Author
- Published
- 1911
- Edition cited
- Harper & Brothers first edition, 1911
- You’re writing performance standards and want to know where the practice comes from: this is the origin. Time study, the planned task, the standard-plus-bonus wage — the whole apparatus of measured work starts here, stated in its strongest and least apologetic form. Reading the original shows what the system was actually for (Taylor’s stated object is joint prosperity, not squeezing labor) and what it assumed about people — both the parts that survived and the parts that a century of practice walked back.
- You’re tempted to systematize a job all the way down: Taylor is the boundary case. The book is the most confident statement ever written of the claim that the management can know the work better than the person doing it — and its worked examples show both the real gains and the posture (the man suited to handling pig iron “is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work”) that made the system infamous. It is the ancestor to study before deciding how far down that road to go.
1
Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Brothers, 1911, ch. 1.
https://www.managementcraft.co/sources/principles-of-scientific-management/original
https://www.managementcraft.co/sources/principles-of-scientific-management/original