The Man Who Remade Industry

...Perhaps mainly to put his own intellectual stamp on the discipline, he tried to develop a universal formula for estimating the time needed to complete any work assignment...

...There was a compensation for the loss of independence and the tyranny of the stopwatch, however...

...Before the 20th century, as the author notes, "If you reckoned costs on the basis of what the average person, on average wages, could acquire, in a sense everything was expensive," because everything required so much mainly self-directed labor...

...It may seem charming to have workers go about their tasks in any way they please, at their own pace, and making products with great individual distinctiveness...

...Although the "enigma" in the subtitle is never identified, this is one of the finest biographies I have ever read, as well as a liberal education in the history of industrial processes...

...His parents, who must truly have been blind, concludedthat he was a dull boy achieving beyond his true level of ability through sheer effort...

...His time studies led to what was supposed to be a method of costing out each job in a way that would dispel class antagonisms: Labor and management, he believed, would accept the outcome because they would recognize its scientific nature...

...Before he came along, manufacturers reduced piece-rates paid for jobs as workers became more adept at them...

...Men setting about milling a cannon trunk, for instance, would have to undertake a variety of tasks...

...It arose from Taylor's acknowledgment that, as he put it in a famous paper, "men will NOT DO AN EXTRAORDINARY DAY'S WORK FOR AN ORDINARY day's pay...

...Current models, in which the programming is largely automated, can be operated by less experienced machinists, and these jobs, which continue to pay well, are open to many more people...

...Preindustrial goods and services required not only too much labor but also labor that was much too skilled...

...This still happens frequently...

...Taylorized workers earned substantially larger incomes...

...In the mid-1870s, at the beginning of Taylor's career, only seven universities offered degrees in mechanical engineering, and hardly anyone bothered to earn them...

...his father, Kanigel estimates, was nearly a millionaire in early 20th-century dollars, which were worth about 10 times more than today's...

...To the Right, he is an embarrassment, for he was no individualist: "In the past, the man was first...

...Most young men inclined in that direction started, as he did, in the shops...

...But he could not lead his people into it himself...

...Scientific management would have emerged without Frederick Taylor...

...Taylor came from wealthy Quaker stock...

...In other words, Taylor's vision was the one that finally became real during the '50s and '60s...

...Nevertheless, his modus operandi for the time studies invited criticism...

...But in a lifetime devoted mostly to the problems of organizing work, perhaps Taylor's most significant achievement, thinks the author, lay in quite a different sphere: the accidental discovery of a process for producing "high-speed" steel, used to make tools that "could cut at twice the old speeds, and the cuts themselves were 40 per cent deeper" Companies now needed fewer expensive machine tools to process a given volume of work...

...They thus encouraged him to pursue what to them was the less intellectually demanding vocation of an engineer...

...fetching tools, installing them in the machine tool, and setting up the workpiece and the dies needed to keep it in place...

...Despite the foregoing achievements, not to mention others in the area of cost accounting, Taylor's record as a manager and consultant was spotty...

...Even so, Taylor's impact was salutary...

...with a stopwatch...

...Any workman exceeding a certain level of output received pay at a relatively high rate for all of it, above and below the threshold...

...His favorite wage scheme involved what he called "differential rates...

...Furthermore, the system, in Taylor's words, would force both to "take their eyes off of the division of the surplus...

...He started in 1878 as a laborer in the machine shop, but soon vaulted into management, progressing to gang boss, foreman, and finally chief engineer...

...Actually, Fred Taylor was a very smart man who worked astonishingly hard at everything he did: In 1881 he won a U.S...

...Taylor tried to build skills into the system rather than presupposing them in the specific workers operating it...

...To appropriate a phrase from Marx, it had to go...

...Despite Taylor's importance, today no one outside of business school claims him as an inspiration...

...often twice what they had made earlier...

...vastly more of it was required to inscribe ideograms on clay blocks three thousand years ago than to use a word processor today, but only a fool would prefer the more difficult technology, which could produce just a tiny number of books by and for a priestly elite...

...particularly human labor, the universal input...

...It involved observing workers...

...Moreover, this elite was very highly trained, so that the deskilling wrought by the alphabet made such work more widely available than it would otherwise have been...

...For once, Lenin got it right...

...Either way, he provided "an almost irresistibly seductive inducement" to accept his workshop rules, as the author says: "The beauty of the social deal that...

...In those days," writes Kanigel, "even the highest cutting speeds were almost absurdly slow," and "scant attention" was paid to maximizing the return on the inputs to machine shop production...

...Though Taylor would take this kind of analysis further than anyone else, it wasn't new, even at Midvale...

...and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus until [it] becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided...

...Taylor apprenticed as a pattern-maker with a company that manufactured steam pumps...

...That is not an intolerable outcome...

...Lenin himself said that the Soviets "must introduce in Russia the study and teaching of the new Taylor System...

...These workers, the most skilled in the business, created wooden models of pump parts...

...Conversely, a worker falling below the set level was paid at a lower rate for the whole...

...Later he apprenticed in the next stage of the productive process, as a machinist...

...that is, work at a deliberately slow pace...

...Taylor offered was that the new, rising tide of prosperity was borne up on two strong shoulders, high wages and low prices...

...The worker had a strong incentive to "soldier...

...in the future, the system must be first," he declared...

...it did go...

...Their best times would be averaged, and then a 40 per cent allowance was factored in for unavoidable delays, mishaps, etc...

...THE MAN WHO REMADE INDUSTRY By Roger Draper Frederick Winslow Taylor, by common consent the father of scientific management, was arguably the single most important person in the industrial history of the United States, or indeed of any nation, during the past century...

...This was due principally to the antagonistic methods used by him in handling men...

...a dramatic gain for all machine industries...

...The 40 per cent, Kanigel notes rightly, was "sheer witchcraft...

...Taylor was the Moses who had the vision of the great industrial promised land of midcentury...

...When computerized machine tools emerged, they required machinists to have considerable programming and mathematical expertise, to say nothing of traditional shop know-how...

...Taylor's second employer was Midvale Steel Corporation...

...The models were used to shape sand molds into which molten steel was poured to create the part...

...Franklin Taylor and his wife spent lives of genteel retirement promoting such virtuous causes as abolition and the education of the feeble-minded...

...At Phillips Exeter Academy Taylor worked hard and got outstanding grades, but an undiagnosed eye ailment gave him constant headaches...

...He was a system-builder from the outset: A boyhood friend remarked on "the strict rules and exact formulas to which he insisted that all of our games must be subjected...

...Yet one should not be misled by this severe comment...

...But as Robert Kanigel remarks in The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Viking, 656 pp., $34.95), his subject created "an approach, a state of mind, applicable to every aspect of life": the systematic search for the most efficient techniques for using inputs...

...These basic components would also be involved in different jobs, such as grinding an axle...

...Open doubles tennis championship while holding a responsible full-time job and studying for an undergraduate degree at Stevens Polytechnic Institute...

...usually the best...

...But this mentality was an obstacle to mass production and thus to mass consumption...

...After breaking up actual jobs into their basic components, Taylor or an acolyte measured the time needed for each of them...

...A colleague, Archibald Johnson, said that "many of the schemes proposed by Fred Taylor had a great deal of merit, [but he] personally did not seem to have the ability to carry them out in a reasonable time...

...It was this "systematic soldiering," as opposed to mere laziness, that he set out to destroy...

...if a shop got an order to build a certain number of pumps, the reward for each part fell steadily as output per unit of time rose...

...The assembly lines created by Henry Ford, his one significant rival, were suited only to certain manufacturing industries...

...Output rose considerably under him, but the time he and those under his command spent on experiments "sometimes usurped the daily work of the shop itself...

...From them, their son derived Quakerism s "peculiar blend of sturdy business sense and moral uplift...

...before the coming of baseball, American games were played under rules that varied widely from place to place, and in all likelihood Taylor merely anticipated modern attitudes...

...Nonetheless, he was its earliest systematic pioneer, the first man who devoted himself chiefly to improving the productive capacity of companies rather than running them...

...Deskilling" is conventionally regarded as an evil, but the truth is that skill is not an end in itself...

...What he subsequently did, in effect, was to extend this mental revolution to the workplace...

...In other factories, Taylor raised output and cut hours dramatically while holding wages at previous levels...

...It was at Midvale that Taylor began his quarter-century-long studies on the cutting of steel, attempting to determine the best speeds and angles for machining cannon...

...To the Left, he is a hate figure...

...Yet in his own day most progressives admired Taylor...