Frederick Winslow Taylor

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Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor



Taylor circa 1900
Born March 20, 1856
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died March 21, 1915 (aged 59)
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Cause of
death
Influenza
Resting place
West Laurel Hill Cemetery
Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Nationality American
Occupation Efficiency expert
Management consultant
Known for "Father" of the
Scientific management
& Efficiency Movement
Home town Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Religion Quaker
Spouse(s) Louise M. Spooner
Children Kempton, Robert and Elizabeth(all adopted
orphans)
Parents Franklin Taylor
Emily Annette Winslow
Awards Elliott Cresson Medal (1902)
Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical
engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency.
[1]
He was one of the first management
consultants.
[2]
Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas,
broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era. Taylor summed up his efficiency
techniques in his book The Principles of Scientific Management.
Biography[
Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy Quaker family in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Taylor's father, Franklin Taylor, a Princeton-educated lawyer, built his wealth
on mortgages.
[3]
Taylor's mother, Emily Annette Taylor (ne Winslow), was an ardent abolitionist and
a coworker with Lucretia Mott. His father's ancestor, Samuel Taylor, settled in Burlington, New
Jersey, in 1677. His mother's ancestor, Edward Winslow, was one of the fifteen original Mayflower
Pilgrims who brought servants or children, and one of eight who had the honorable distinction of
Mister. Winslow served for many years as the Governor of the Plymouth colony.
Educated early by his mother, Taylor studied for two years in France and Germany and traveled
Europe for 18 months.
[4]
In 1872, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire,
with the plan of eventually going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer like his father. In 1874, Taylor
passed the Harvard entrance examinations with honors. However, due allegedly to rapidly
deteriorating eyesight, Taylor chose quite a different path.
Instead of attending Harvard, Taylor became an apprentice patternmaker and machinist, gaining
shop-floor experience at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia (a pump-manufacturing
company whose proprietors were friends of the Taylor family). He left his apprenticeship for six
months and represented a group of New England machine-tool manufacturers at Philadelphia's
centennial exposition. Taylor finished his four-year apprenticeship and in 1878 became a machine-
shop laborer at Midvale Steel Works. At Midvale, he was quickly promoted to time clerk, journeyman
machinist, gang boss over the lathe hands, machine shop foreman, research director, and finally
chief engineer of the works (while maintaining his position as machine shop foreman). Taylor's fast
promotions probably reflected not only his talent but also his family's relationship with Edward Clark,
part owner of Midvale Steel. (Edward Clark's son Clarence Clark, who was also a manager at
Midvale Steel, married Taylor's sister.)
Early on at Midvale, working as a laborer and machinist, Taylor recognized that workmen were not
working their machines, or themselves, nearly as hard as they could (which at the time was called
"soldiering") and that this resulted in high labor costs for the company. When he became a foreman
he expected more output from the workmen and in order to determine how much work should
properly be expected he began to study and analyze the productivity of both the men and the
machines (although the word "productivity" was not used at the time, and the applied science of
productivity had not yet been developed). His focus on the human component of production
eventually became Scientific Management, while the focus on the machine component led to his
famous metal-cutting and materials innovations.
While Taylor worked at Midvale, he and Clarence Clark won the first tennis doubles tournament in
the 1881 US National Championships, the precursor of the US Open.
[1]
Taylor became a student
of Stevens Institute of Technology, studying via correspondence
[5]
and obtaining a degree in
mechanical engineering in 1883. On May 3, 1884, he married Louise M. Spooner of Philadelphia.
From 1890 until 1893 Taylor worked as a general manager and a consulting engineer to
management for the Manufacturing Investment Company of Philadelphia, a company that operated
large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin. He spent time as a plant manager in Maine. In 1893,
Taylor opened an independent consulting practice in Philadelphia. His business card read
"Consulting Engineer - Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty".
Through these consulting experiences, Taylor perfected his management system. In 1898 he
joined Bethlehem Steel in order to solve an expensive machine-shop capacity problem. As a result,
he and Maunsel White, with a team of assistants, developed high speed steel, paving the way for
greatly increased mass production. Taylor was forced to leave Bethlehem Steel in 1901 after discord
with other managers.
After leaving Bethlehem Steel, Taylor focused the rest of his career on publicly promoting his
management and machining methods through lecturing, writing, and consulting. In 1910, owing to
the Eastern Rate Case, Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Scientific Management methodologies
become famous worldwide. In 1911, Taylor introduced his The Principles of Scientific Management
paper to the American mechanical engineering society, eight years after his Shop Management
paper.
On October 19, 1906, Taylor was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by
the University of Pennsylvania.
[6]
Taylor eventually became a professor at the Tuck School of
Business at Dartmouth College.
[7]
In early spring of 1915 Taylor caught pneumonia and died, one
day after his fifty-ninth birthday, on March 21, 1915. He was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery,
in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.
Work
Taylor was a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor is regarded as
the father of scientific management, and was one of the firstmanagement consultants and director of
a famous firm. In Peter Drucker's description,
Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic
observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of
affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed
countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac
Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not
much has been added to them since even though he has been dead all of sixty years.
Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:
1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to
train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that
worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. 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.
Future US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis coined the term scientific management in the
course of his argument for the Eastern Rate Case before theInterstate Commerce Commission in
1910. Brandeis argued that railroads, when governed according to Taylor's principles, did not need
to raise rates to increase wages. Taylor used Brandeis's term in the title of his monograph The
Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. The Eastern Rate Case propelled Taylor's
ideas to the forefront of the management agenda. Taylor wrote to Brandeis "I have rarely seen a
new movement started with such great momentum as you have given this one." Taylor's approach is
also often referred to as Taylor's Principles, or, frequently disparagingly, as Taylorism.
Managers and workers
Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:
It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements
and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty
of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.
Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor
this was true even for rather simple tasks.
'I can say, without the slightest hesitation,' Taylor told a congressional committee, 'that the science of
handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is ... physically able to handle pig-iron and is
sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the
science of handling pig-iron.
Taylor believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the
distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans
specifying the job, and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and
communicated to the workers.
The introduction of his system was often resented by workers and provoked numerous strikes. The
strike at Watertown Arsenal led to the congressional investigation in 1912. Taylor believed the
laborer was worthy of his hire, and pay was linked to productivity. His workers were able to earn
substantially more than those under conventional management, and this earned him enemies
among the owners of factories where scientific management was not in use.
Propaganda techniques
Taylor promised to reconcile labor and capital.
With the triumph of scientific management, unions would have nothing left to do, and they would
have been cleansed of their most evil feature: the restriction of output. To underscore this idea,
Taylor fashioned the myth that 'there has never been a strike of men working under scientific
management', trying to give it credibility by constant repetition. In similar fashion he incessantly
linked his proposals to shorter hours of work, without bothering to produce evidence of "Taylorized"
firms that reduced working hours, and he revised his famous tale of Schmidt carrying pig iron at
Bethlehem Steel at least three times, obscuring some aspects of his study and stressing others, so
that each successive version made Schmidt's exertions more impressive, more voluntary and more
rewarding to him than the last. Unlike [Harrington] Emerson, Taylor was not a charlatan, but his
ideological message required the suppression of all evidence of worker's dissent, of coercion, or of
any human motives or aspirations other than those his vision of progress could encompass.

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 stopwatch time study, which combined with Frank Gilbreth's motion
study methods later becomes the field of 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 21 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. Nevertheless, Taylor was able to convince workers who used
shovels and whose compensation was tied to how much they produced to adopt his advice about
the optimum way to shovel by breaking the movements down into their component elements and
recommending better ways to perform these movements. It was largely through the efforts of his
disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that industry came to implement his ideas. Moreover, the book he
wrote after parting company with Bethlehem Steel, Shop Management, sold well.
Relations with ASME
Taylor's own written works were designed for presentation to the American Society of Mechanical
Engineers (ASME). These include Notes on Belting (1894), A Piece-Rate System (1895), Shop
Management (1903), Art of Cutting Metals (1906), and The Principles of Scientific Management
(1911).
Taylor was president of the 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 Age.
In 1911, 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.

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