Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor is a controversial figure in management history. His innovations in industrial engineering, particularly in time and motion studies, paid off in dramatic improvements in productivity. At the same time, he has been credited with destroying the soul of work, of dehumanizing factories, making men into automatons.

“Born in 1856 into a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor disappointed his parents by working in a metal products factory, first as a machinist and next as a foreman. Shocked at the factory's inefficiency, and the practice of its skilled workers of purposely working slowly, Taylor proposed solutions that he believed would solve both problems. By studying the time it took each worker to complete a step, and by rearranging equipment, Taylor believed he could discover what an average worker could produce in optimum conditions. The promise of higher wages, he figured, would create added incentive for workers to exceed this "average" level. Taylor's time-and-motion studies offered a path away from the industrial wars of a century ago. Now what was needed was a way to apportion the wealth created by manufacturing enterprises. Taylor's answer sidestepped the class struggle and interest-group politics.
Generally creating enemies wherever he worked, and willing to bend the facts to suit his theories, Taylor's methods paid off, when on the eve of World War I, "Taylorism" became the first big management fad. An extreme version of Taylor's mind-set found its way into the operation of Nazi death camps and communist totalitarianism. The Taylor method prescribed a clockwork world of tasks timed to the hundredth of a minute, of standardized factories, machines, women and men. Naturally, ordinary workers resented having to work faster then they thought was healthy or fair.
It came to be revealed, that in case after case, Taylor and his adherents didn't actually use their time studies as the sole basis for setting normative output. Acknowledging that workers could not sustain peak level performances all day long, they used a margin of error or fudge factor of as much as a third to set a more realistic level. This of course, struck at the credibility that Taylor's system was based on scientific laws.”

Taylor believed that the industrial management of his day was amateurish, that management could be formulated as an academic discipline, 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, and there was no need for trade unions.
Louis Brandeis, who was an active propagandist of Taylorism (Montgomery 1989: 250), coined the term scientific management in the course of his argument for the Eastern Rate Case, which Taylor used in the title of his monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. His approach is also often referred to, as Taylor's Principles, or frequently disparagingly, as Taylorism. Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:

-Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
-Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them train themselves.
-Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.
-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.

These principles were implemented in many factories, often increasing productivity by a factor of three or more. Henry Ford applied Taylor’s principles in his automobile factories, and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and motion studies.