Frederick Winslow Taylor

Early years

Taylor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a wealthy Quaker family. He had intended to pursue his education at Harvard University, but poor eyesight forced him to consider an alternative career. In 1874, he became an apprentice machinist, learning of factory conditions at the grass-roots level. He got a degree in Mechanical Engineering through a highly unusual (for the time) series of correspondence courses at Stevens Institute of Technology (graduating in 1883) (Kanigel 1997:182-183,199).

The development of management

Taylor thought that by analyzing work, the "One Best Way" to do it would be found. He is most remembered for developing the time and motion study. He would break a job into its component parts and measure each to the second. One of his most famous studies involved shovels. He noticed that the workers used the same shovel for all materials. He determined that the most effective load was 21½ lb, and found or designed shovels that for each material would scoop up that amount. He was generally unsuccessful at applying his concepts; it was largely through his disciples (most notably H.L. Gantt) that his ideas were implemented in industry. After being fired from Bethlehem Steel he wrote a book, Shop Management, which sold well.

Taylor believed that contemporary management was amateurish and should be studied as a discipline, that workers should cooperate with management (and hence would not need trade unions), and that the best results would come from the partnership between a trained and qualified management and a cooperative and innovative workforce. Each side needed the other.

Taylor was a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, founded in 1900. He is known for coinage of the term scientific management in his monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. However, his approach is often referred to, as Taylor's Principles, or frequently disparagingly, as Taylorism.

Taylor developed four principles of Scientific Management...

   1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

   2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

   3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.

   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

Harvard University, one of the first American universities to offer a graduate degree in business management in 1908, based its first-year curriculum on Taylor's ideas regarding scientific management. His ideas, as well as Henry Ford's, relating to efficiency became highly influential during the early days of the Soviet Union.

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