Scientific Management

Taylor's Thought

Interest in Taylor's thinking was dealt a severe blow by Kakar's 1970 biography, which portrays Taylor as dysfunctional and antisocial, an obsessivecompulsive in need of psychological treatment. But we cannot understand SM's persistence from this position. SM was not the outcome of Taylor's efforts alone. As early as 1886, Henry Towne helped set SM's broad agenda within the United States. SM was part of a widespread, even worldwide movement among engineers who realized 19th-century factory practices were grossly inefficient and mismanaged. The business challenge was not global competition, as it is today. Rather, it was to overcome a sequence of economic depressions, develop the nation's infrastructure, employ the migrating millions pouring into the United States, raise living standards, create a middle class, and meet rising demand for goods of every type. SM's engineers saw inefficiency and waste as this program's main enemy, something barely comprehensible in today's global economy characterized by overcapacity and disposable products.

Despite his comfortable background and education, Taylor learned about management from the bottom up, starting as a machinist, becoming foreman and gang boss, and rising to plant manager and chief engineer. Crucially, he also learned about managing industrial innovation while conducting a series of path-breaking experiments into high-speed steel machining. He was able to retire early in part on the income from the Taylor-White machine tool patents that emerged from this work. These were revolutionary and could lead to an immediate fourfold increase in productivity. They [Page 1394]remain important today. Indeed, engineering and military historians suggest they were a major factor in the Allies' victory in World War I.

The essence of SM is the transference of these methods of managing learning-by-doing to the management of organizational work generally—into “getting organized.” In The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), Taylor relates their application to the most mundane activities, shoveling “rice coal” (small nuggets of anthracite) or moving 92-pound “pigs” of cast iron into railway wagons. Taylor and his staff methodically timed and analyzed this work, searching for the “one best way” and often designing superior tools. Catalogs of the day offered Americans dozens of different spades and shovels. The one used for cutting sod would not be the same as that used for digging clay or that used for shoveling coke cinder. Skilled craftsmen know to choose their tools carefully, as a surgeon or skier might today, but the U.S. workers in Taylor's time were often rural immigrants, unknowledgeable even in which shovel to use in an industrial setting. SM's engineers believed they needed training in how to apply themselves more efficiently.

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