Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Birth of Scientific Management

The growth of business in the United States has seen the adoption of new equipment and jobs related to all that new equipment. It has also been a story of new ways of thinking and advancing business processes. When writing the post about time recording clocks, I ran across the name of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a businessman who was considered one of the first management consultants. In 1917, journalist Ida Tarbell, in an address, “The Fear of Efficiency,” had this to say:

“These principles have been worked out with mathematical, exactness and their soundness is capable of proof. Many men have been interested in their development, but to one man above all others is due the credit of their present scientific form. That man is Frederick Winslow Taylor.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 in Philadelphia, PA and, after schooling, went to work for Midvale Steel. While he was there, he took an interest in the idea of efficiency in work activities and specific tasks and developed what he called “scientific management.” He later worked for Bethlehem Steel, but eventually opened his own consulting practice where he further developed his management system, sometimes referred to as Taylorism. He was elected president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, elected to the American Philosophical Society, and earned a professorship at the Tuck School of Business.

His paper “A Piece-Rate System, Being a Step Toward Partial Solution of the Labor Problem,” which was read before a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1895, was the first of several well-known works Taylor wrote, and led him to write his book, The Principles of Scientific Management. This book became a classic of management literature and one of the most influential management books of the 20^th century. The introduction laid out the book’s three goals:

To illustrate how the country loses through inefficiency.
To show that the solution to inefficiency is systematic management.
To show that the best management rests on defined laws, rules, and principles that can be applied to all kinds of human activity.

What is scientific management? Dr. Frederick W. Taylor says : "The art of management has been defined 'as knowing exactly what you want men to do and then seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way' (Shop Management); also, 'The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee. Scientific Management 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 worker what he most wants —high wages —and the employer what he wants —a low labor cost —for his manufactures.'' ''Principles of Scientific Management." Harper and Brothers. — Taylor on scientific management printed in Primer of Scientific Management, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, 1912 (p. 1)

Horace B. Drury in his 1915 book, Scientific Management; A History and Criticism, published just a few years after Taylor‘s book, devoted one full chapter to Taylor and others to Midvale and Bethlehem Steel. Other chapters include an early history of scientific management that mentions Taylor, and attention to the 1910 Eastern Rate Case before the Interstate Commerce Commission that looked at scientific efficiency and helped kick off the efficiency craze. The arguments in the Eastern Rate Case were made by Louis D. Brandeis (later Supreme Court Justice) and significantly raised Taylor’s profile.

Taylor died in 1915, but his ideas are still impactful. Terms like “best practices” and benchmarking have entered the management lexicon. The management consultant industry with businesses like McKinsey and organizations like the APQC (American Productivity & Quality Center) are an outgrowth of his work. Without Taylor and all those that came after him, would there be management systems like Total Quality Management (TQM) or Six Sigma, or awards like the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award?

The Library is a good resource for anyone looking into the history of business improvement or scientific management. We have a number of issues of the Taylor Society’s Bulletin and have digitized a few older items related to scientific management, which you can find on our website. There are many titles with subject headings related to Business consultants, Industrial management, etc. Our collection has over two thousand books with the subject heading, “Industrial efficiency” alone. If you are interested in Taylor himself, there are also a few biographies:

Frederick W. Taylor, father of scientific management, by Frank Barkley Copley. (1923)
Frederick W. Taylor and the rise of scientific management, by Daniel Nelson. (1980)
Frederick W. Taylor, the father of scientific management: myth and reality, by Charles D. Wrege, Ronald G. Greenwood. (1991)
The one best way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the enigma of efficiency, by Robert Kanigel. (1997)

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