The Principles of Scientific Management (Illustrated): More current, Impossible!

About the autor

Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical engineer. He was a mechanic and laborer, he graduated as a mechanical engineer studying at night. He wrote the book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. He is considered the father of Scientific Administration, for proposing the use of Cartesian scientific methods in business administration. His focus was efficiency and operational effectiveness in industrial and commercial administration.

Frederick Taylor believed that by offering systematic and appropriate instructions to workers, that is, by training them, there would be the possibility of making them produce more and with better quality. Federico considered that all work requires, preliminarily, a study so that a methodology of its own is determined, always aiming at its maximum development.

In relation to productivity and the participation of human resources, it established the co-participation between capital and labor, the result of which will reflect lower costs, higher wages and, mainly, increases in productivity levels.

In relation to the self-control of the activities carried out and the procedural rules, Federico introduced the control with the aim that the work was carried out according to a pre-programmed sequence and time, so that the operational time is not wasted.

Functional supervision has also been included, stating that all phases of work must be monitored in order to verify that operations are being carried out in accordance with scheduled instructions. Finally, he noted that these scheduled instructions should be systematically transmitted to all employees.

It included a system of payment for the quantity produced or sold. This caused employees' income to increase according to their efforts. Therefore, Taylor was able to significantly maximize the efficiency of the organization.

Why is this book important?

Increasingly, business success depends on good management. And keep in mind that the business here can be a company, a non-profit organization, a company, or even a personal project.

There are methods that become disposable and obsolete over time. But in the case of the principles of scientific management you will realize that their pillars are still increasingly valid, needing only to contextualize for the technologies currently used, but the need to treat management more and more as science continues.

Several companies fail before completing their second year. Many people try to put their ideas into practice in an amateur way and end up frustrated. In this book, which is a classic of administration, you can observe important concepts such as:

Leadership

Productivity

Division of labour

Study and times and movements

Creation of standardized operating procedures

Need for training and training

The need for collaboration between managers and employees.

The importance of planning activities, among others.

Want an example of how important this is? Look at the case of the covid-19 pandemic: how important was the planning work, the division of labor, increasing efficiency in large-scale vaccine production. Definition and standardization of hygiene procedures for the population among other things.

For a long time, the ideas of scientific management were criticized because they claimed that only managers should think and that workers should only learn and execute, without question.

In this book you will see that, even in Taylor's original ideas, there was room for workers to submit proposals to improve processes and that such proposals should be carefully analyzed by management.

Good read!

Introduction

President Roosevelt in his address to the Governors at the White House, prophetically remarked that "The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary to the larger question of national efficiency."

The whole country at once recognized the importance of conserving our material resources and a large movement has been started which will be effective in accomplishing this object. As yet, however, we have but vaguely appreciated the importance of the larger question of increasing our national efficiency.

We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a, lack of national efficiency, are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated.

We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little.

As yet there has been no public agitation for greater national efficiency, no meetings have been called to consider how this is to be brought about. And still there are signs that the need for greater efficiency is widely felt.

The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply.

What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom some one else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency.

In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that Captains of industry are born, not made; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before.

This paper has been written:

First.

Second. To try to convince the reader that:

Third.

resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. And, briefly, through a series of illustrations, to convince the reader that whenever these principles are correctly applied, results must follow which are truly astounding.

This paper was originally prepared for presentation to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The illustrations chosen are such as, it is believed, will especially appeal to engineers and to managers of industrial and manufacturing establishments, and also quite as much to all of the men who are working in these establishments. It is hoped, however, that it will be clear to other readers that the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities: to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions our universities, and our governmental departments.

CHAPTER I

Fundamentals of scientific management

The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee.

The words maximum prosperity are used, in their broad sense, to mean not only large dividends for the company or owner, but the development of every branch of the business to its highest state of excellence, so that the prosperity may be permanent. In the same way maximum prosperity for each employee means not only higher wages than are usually received by men of his class, but, of more importance still, it also means the development of each man to his state of maximum efficiency, so that he may be able to do, generally speaking, the highest grade of work for which his natural abilities fit him, and it further means giving him, when possible, this class of work to do.

It would seem to be so self-evident that maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with maximum prosperity for the employee, ought to be the two leading objects of management, that even to state this fact should be unnecessary. And yet there is no question that, throughout the industrial world, a large part of the organization of employers, as well as employees, is for war rather than for peace, and that perhaps the majority on either side do not believe that it is possible so to arrange their mutual relations that their interests become identical.

The majority of these men believe that the fundamental interests of employees and employers are necessarily antagonistic. Scientific management, on the contrary, has for its very foundation the firm conviction that the true interests of the two are one and the same; that prosperity for the employer cannot exist through a long term of years unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employee, and vice versa; and that it is possible to give the workman what he most wants—high wages—and the employer what he wants—a low labor cost—for his manufactures.

It is hoped that some at least of those who do not sympathize with each of these objects may be led to modify their views; that some employers, whose attitude toward their workmen has been that of trying to get the largest amount of work out of them for the smallest possible wages, may be led to see that a more liberal policy toward their men will pay them better; and that some of those workmen who begrudge a fair and even a large profit to their employers, and