Taylor, Frederick Winslow 1856-1915

TAYLOR, FREDERICK WINSLOW 1856-1915

Management consultant

Obsession with Order

Born into a puritanically disciplined family, Frederick Winslow Taylor became a man preoccupied with control. He had an obsessive-compulsive character and was driven by a relentless need to tie down and master almost every aspect of his life. His activities at home, in the garden, and on the golf course, as well as at work were dominated by programs and schedules, planned in detail and rigidly followed. Even his afternoon walks were carefully laid out in advance. The obsession with order that was manifested later in Taylorism began when he was a child. Childhood friends described the meticulous "scientific" approach that he brought to their games. Before playing baseball he would insist that accurate measurements be made of the field, so that everyone would be in perfect relation. A game of croquet was a subject of careful analysis as Taylor worked out the angles of the various strokes, calculating the force of impact and the advantages and disadvantages of understroke and overstroke. As an adolescent, before going to a dance, he made lists of the attractive and unattractive girls likely to be present, so that he would be sure to spend equal time with each.

Beginnings of Taylorism

During the course of the nineteenth century, unskilled workers and machines had begun to replace skilled craftsmen. Yet because of their specialized knowledge, the more skilled workers continued to exert control over the pace of work, the methods used, and the levels of output. Working as a chief engineer in the Midvale Steel Company in the 1880s, Taylor came to the conclusion that in order to increase production, managers had to take control of the process. Taylor started by doing time studies of each factory job. He observed workers meticulously, analyzing each step in terms of time spent and energy expended, and determined the best method for each task. This standard method would be required of every worker, with scaled piecework rates providing financial incentives for higher output and financial penalties for output below the established benchmarks. Taylor's methods of standardization, close accounting, and managerial control increased production at the Midvale plant.

Bethlehem Steel

Taylor later became involved with Bethlehem Steel, where he worked from 1898 to 1901. With fellow inventor Maunsel White, he developed the Taylor-White process for hardening tool steel, which made him wealthy. He also tried to implement his principles of scientific management at the plant. He introduced a piece-rate system to replace the company's existing day-rate wage system. He applied his time-and-motion study methods to the handling of real materials in the yards and concluded that only 140 men would be needed to do work that had previously required more than 400. To Taylor's dismay, Bethlehem's owners were not pleased. It appeared to Taylor that Bethlehem did not want to alienate the community around its plant. Many of his suggestions, such as increased job specialization, standardization of work procedures, and salary increases for key personnel to reduce turnover, were not adopted. The owners dismissed Taylor in April 1901, six weeks before Charles M. Schwab bought controlling interest in the company. Taylor said that "the moment Schwab took charge of the Bethlehem works in 1901, he ordered our whole system thrown out. He saw no use whatever in paying premiums for fast work; much less in having time study men and slide rule men, 'supernumeraries,' as he called them, in the works at all."

Management Consultant

Since the steel-hardening process had made him independently wealthy, Taylor was able to concentrate on his concept of scientific management throughout the remainder of the decade and entered the management consultant business. His business cards in the early years of consulting read, "Systemizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Cost a Specialty." He visited corporations to promote his system and illustrate how to implement his ideas. While Taylor's methods were not popular with laborers who feared a loss of autonomy and new pressures to produce, management began to embrace Taylor's ideas.

Taylorism

One of Taylor's most important changes in factory management was the elimination of the shop foreman. He proposed instead to form a planning department to administer the factory as a whole and to do so through highly specialized shop bosses, or functional foremen. This would subdivide the activities of the general shift foreman into specialized parts. The planning department was also to supervise job analyses and information, to schedule the flows of current orders, and to set the daily work plan for each operation unit and for each worker in the factory. The planning department was to be in charge of the recruitment and layoff of workers and was to be responsible for the maintenance of the entire planning system. Although his concept of extreme specialization proved unacceptable to most manufacturers, many of his basic concepts were adopted. The weakness of his system was its failure to pinpoint authority and responsibility for completing departmental tasks and for maintaining a steady flow of materials from one stage of the process to the other. No factory owner adopted the Taylor system without modifying it.

The Later Years

Opposition to Taylor's method of scientific management increased during the later years of his life. Owners and managers often refused to institute his entire system, because of its complexity and extreme specialization. He encountered increasing hostility to his system from union workers, who walked out of the shop when scientific management was introduced. In 1911 a strike of molders at the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts and an American Federation of Labor campaign against his system led to a congressional investigation of Taylorism. Their conclusions indicated that scientific management was not designed to ensure the best interests of the worker. His management system, nevertheless, profoundly affected American industry, but its impact in practical terms consisted mostly of changes in machine operations, plant layout, and managerial activities.

Sources:

Gareth Morgan, Images of Organizations (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1986);

Frederick Winslow Taylor, Principies of Scientific Management (New York & London: Harper, 1911).