The Man Who Changed Work Forever

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The Man Who Changed Work Forever
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• With stopwatch in hand, Frederick Taylor, the
  early-20th-century time and motion consultant,
  created the concepts that drive modern industrial
  production.
• Alan farnham

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• When Taylor died in 1915, his fame was universal.
  Lenin advocated his productivity-promoting
  notions. Peter Drucker calls Taylorism "the most
  lasting contribution America has made to Western
  thought."
• Wasn't Henry Ford a bigger deal? No, says
  Drucker. The assembly line was just one logical
  extension of scientific management.

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• Today his name is little known except to
  academics. That it rings even a faint bell in
  average minds is thanks to a Hollywood
  confection, Cheaper by the Dozen, in which an
  efficiency expert so bent on having every task
  done right that he times--with a stopwatch--how
  long it takes his children to rush into his arms
  when he returns from business trips.
• That Taylor should be remembered through Cheaper
  by the Dozen is as if Christ were to be
  remembered for having inspired Monty Python's
  Life of Brian.
• Taylor's influence is omnipresent It's his ideas
  that determine how many burgers McDonald's
  expects its flippers to flip or how many callers
  the phone company expects its operators to
  assist.
• So who was he? And what exactly was his -ism?

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• Taylor was born into a well-to-do Philadelphia
  family in 1856. From his boyhood on, he sought to
  improve everything he touched. Other kids viewed
  him as a crank, since he seemed more interested
  in laying out the ball field correctly than in
  playing ball. As an adult he designed an
  "improved" golf club (a putter with two handles
  that looked like a divining rod) and a spoonlike
  tennis racket. (He won the U.S. Open for doubles
  in 1881.)
• Such eccentricities, however, were only the
  domestic, semi-endearing expressions of his
  mania. In 1874 he turned his attention to the
  workplace. Determined to be an engineer, he
  obtained a job as an apprentice in a machine
  shop, where he soon observed that each workman
  was, in effect, an artist Each did his job his
  own way.

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• When Taylor rose to foreman, he asked himself how
  much work a man ought to be able to do if he
  approached his job the right way. No matter what
  the task--shoveling dirt or hoisting iron
  bars--Taylor broke it down into its smallest
  constituent movements, timing each one with a
  stopwatch. After teasing a job apart, he
  reassembled it, reducing not only the number of
  motions but also effort and the risk of error.
  Taylor called his analysis "time and
  motion-study."
• He devised as well a differential pay scale,
  since one of his maxims was that no man would do
  an extraordinary day's work for an ordinary day's
  pay. Workers willing to follow Taylor's
  instruction found that their productivity soared.
  They found, too, that they could double or even
  triple their old pay. The joke was, of course,
  that their jobs weren't really theirs anymore.
  They were Taylor's. There was but one way to work
  now the one best way.

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• As the pace of work accelerated, some workers
  rebelled (despite the higher pay), and complaints
  against Taylor by organized labor landed him in
  front of a Senate investigatory hearing shortly
  before his death. He departed life under a
  cloud--one that shadows him to this day. Labor's
  antipathy, in fact, is one reason he isn't better
  known