F.W. Taylor is where the serious student of scientific management begins. I believe that it's one of the best books on the subject that I've ever read - and it was an academic paper presented by Taylor almost 100 years ago. It's funny at times (and probably not meant to be), written in the academic style of the early 20th century. His movements back and forth between the theory and real life examples prove that he was one of the better economists of his day.

Taylor had humble beginnings (he was a shop laborer early in his career), and later he switched to consulting for various types of manufacturers. Peter F. Drucker and other scientific management gurus owe Taylor a debt of gratitude, which I'm sure they would readily acknowledge. All of us owe a debt to him as well. How can a firm reach greater efficiencies? Taylor suggested that firms do it in ways that even today are resisted and misunderstood by management. Increase workers' pay. Give them mandatory breaks throughout the day. Timing rest breaks between heavy lifting optimizes productivity. Please don't ignore these examples in the information age - Taylor was ahead of his time and perhaps even ahead of ours. Today's intelligent manager can still discover many useful ideas in this book.

It's not a terribly long work, and it's fun to read. I'm surprised that I was able to earn a BSBA without being required to read it, or parts of it. It's invaluable for firms and workers in any country, developed or undeveloped, and the firms that dare to utilize the ideas will be quite happy with the result: increased productivity, and therefore, increased profits. econ

Let me caution you before commenting on this book. Most people who refer to Taylor and Scientific Management have not read Taylor, but about Taylor in secondary sources. So, forget what you have heard about Taylor. Keep an open mind.

Prior to Taylor, management tried to create output by providing incentives to workers. But pressure from peers kept workers from doing more work. Everyone agreed that this would lead to fewer jobs.

The virtuous cycle of higher performance, lower prices, more sales, and higher pay for workers and shareholders was not yet uncovered.

Taylor sees the results of the higher productivity mostly being of help to consumers, with the remainder of the benefit split between shareholders and workers. In that he was prescient. Advanced thinkers today are rediscovering this old truth, first elaborated by Taylor.

What I found to be delightful in the book was the emphasis on trying to approach the ideal practice, rather than being satisfied with the best of today.

Here are the key principles for your reference:

(1) develop a science for each element of a task to determine the most productive way to do that task (quality and quantity considered in terms of total costs)

(2) scientifically select and train those who can do the task the most effectively in what needs to be done, and provide all of the help they need

(3) create an environment where the person doing the task can be productive (this often involves systems limitations, like input from others)

(4) management has a role in designing the work, selecting workers who are ideal for the work, and helping the work be learned properly. There is an equal division between the worker and management in creating the right result.

In reading this list, I am reminded of Bill Jensen's new book, Simplicity, in which he calls for something rather similar to the broad concepts of Scientific Management. So although many people consider almost all existing management Taylorian, a closer examination would say that management is not doing its job.

The basic problem with Scientific Management was not that it was flawed, but that it took slow long to do that it was impractical to try too many experiments. The time and measurement experiments took forever. The calculations of multivariate problems were hard to solve in precomputer days. The change process was slow (usually 3-5 years).

The experiments that we all know about and applaud now (team-based learning and self-directed work teams, TQM, reengineering, and so forth) could have been addressed by the Scientific Management method as soon as the limitations described above could be lifted.

As a result, I think it is incorrect to be pro TQM or reengineering and anti Scientific Management. I believe that the basic principles are more compatible than not.

At some point, all of this becomes merely philosophical. I think you will find the case studies in the book revealing about what the potential for improvement can be in tasks that people have been doing for centuries (like laying bricks).

I was impressed that Taylor was so good at locating stalls of disbelief, misconception, communication, and bureaucracy. He had a keen sense of where mental models were wrong, and how to bust those stalls. In fact, he may have been the 19th century's first business stallbuster.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in understanding more about how measurements can be useful to identifying ways to improve performance for all of society.

Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management is unsurpassed by any other in its' understanding of the job of management and the worker. Taylor's book shows what good quality critical thinking applied to industry can accomplish. Taylor placed the burden of management totally on management and not the worker unlike so much of the worker incentive and innovation crap that we hear today. Taylor's manager really knew what he was doing and was not just a slave-driver as was common in his day and our day. Taylor had been a worker as well as manager and understood what motivated the first-class worker so as to get top performance out of him. Hint: It's not goofy awards or kudos or gain sharing or profit sharing. This book should be required reading for all managers and workers.

For anyone who has worked - on an assembly line, as a bureaucrat-in-a-box - the greatest workplace nemesis is a nonexistent ideal: the theoretical person against whom your "efficiency" is measured. Often, not even a boss or office rival is as irritating as this cold standard, the product of stopwatch-wielding efficiency experts and industrial psychologists who claim to have a scientific measure of "average output." In The One Best Way, science writer Robert Kanigel examines the first so-called efficiency expert of them all: Frederick Taylor, the turn-of-the-century engineer and pioneering management consultant.

Taylor's idea was simple: break down all jobs into their smallest component tasks, experiment to determine the best way to accomplish them and how fast they can be performed, and then find the right workers to do them. It was called scientific management, or "Taylorism" -- a formula to maximize the productivity of industrial workers. "The coming of Taylorism," Kanigel writes, took "currents of thought drifting through his own time -- standards, order, production, regularity, efficiency -- and codif[ied] them into a system that defines our age."

Though he had an enormous impact on our everyday lives, today Taylor is little known outside management circles. This is curious: in his own time, Taylor was a world-class celebrity, advocating an organizational revolution that would link harder work to higher wages -- as well as instituting shorter working hours and regular "cigarette breaks." His books and articles were translated into all the major languages and passionately studied, even in the Soviet Union, as guides to a future industrial utopia; he was, in many ways, Stalin's prophet. Yet Taylor was also reviled as a slave driver who devalued skilled labor and despised the common worker, and he was ridiculed as a failure in many of his business undertakings.

Much of Kanigel's book is devoted to descriptions of the shops that Taylor worked in: a ball-bearing factory, a paper mill, and machine-tool plants, to name a few. It's dramatic how different the world he describes is from the work environment of today. Here were no highly educated managers attempting to exercise minute control over relatively unskilled employees. Instead, craftsmen dominated these oily pits -- spinning steel-cutting lathes, constructing elaborate sand molds for machine tools, and maintaining the gigantic leather belts that harnessed the energy of central steam engines. THis was in many ways the most fascinating part of the book for me: I learned what people did in the decaying mills that surrounded my New England home.

To all but the most practiced eye, such a workplace was a chaotic scene. What the craftsmen did -- and what they were capable of -- was largely a mystery to management, which deprived the managers of control and power, leading to a number of stunningly counterproductive practices. If tool and die makers produced jigs beyond a certain threshold, for example, 19th-century foremen would dock (!) their pay per item -- an obvious incentive for them to slow down. And because ball-bearing inspectors in a Fitchburg mill worked slowly and talked too much, they were forced to put in 101/2 -hour days, without breaks.

Taylor witnessed such practices and decided to change them. In one of his most famous experiments, on "Schmidt", he got a common laborer to double the number of bars of pig iron he transported down a plank each day. All he did was pay the man more, linking higher output directly to higher wages -- hardly a revolutionary thought today. His solution for the gossipy ball-bearing inspectors was to separate them, shorten their working hours, increase their pay, and allow them to relax occasionally; in return, they were expected to work harder, and they did.

Once Kanigel establishes that Taylor's method worked well (to a certain extent), the book becomes tough going. Despite his elegant prose, Kanigel's exhaustive treatment of his subject's life and experiments strained my interest. Do we really need to know, for example, that Taylor once spent months alternating the size of coal shovels in the name of furnace-stoking efficiency? Or the entire list of his vacation companions for one summer? Such biographical detail can add spice to a compelling narrative, but to include them only as an exercise in thoroughness, as Kanigel does, is simply tiring. Taylor simply is not interesting as a personality.

Kanigel also glosses over many important issues. Taylorism really did devalue certian kind sof skilled labor, and the costs have been high. The "Taylorized" doctors of the HMO era, for example, must work with administrators peeking over their shoulders, dispensing pills at the expense of empathy and other unmeasurable healing skills. And once factory workers lost their control and even their comprehension of manufacturing processes, many ceased to take pride in their work and stopped making suggestions for improvement. This may be one reason why Japanese and European design is often superior to American. Taylorism also spawned the rise of management consulting, with its sham exercises and goals -- often a huge diversion of managerial talent in the name of efficiency. Kanigel, however, largely ignores this darker side of Taylorism; the true impact of his legacy gets lost in the details. The result is a 600-page profile of a narrow and compulsive man with a single, if influential, idea.

Recommended, but only for scholars and specialists.

Kanigel illuminates the life and times of both Fred Taylor and the revolution his ideas spawned. Without explicitly understanding how Taylor's ideas have shaped our lives we cannot understand the profound impact this 19th Centruy man continues having on our day-to-day lives. With the often misplaced notion of efficiency so deeply ingrained in the very fabric of our lives, we often ignore the profound impacts of blind quests for efficiency.

Who do you know who can reliably recognize the tipping point where efficiency destroys effectiveness (and with it competitiveness)? Who do you know who would challenge changes in the name of efficiency because the changes would impair quality, effectiveness, morale, or labor relations? Without understanding Fred Taylor and efficiency, how can you avoid mistaken applications of the notion? What will keep a 19th Century man from being the most influential man of both the 20th Century and the 21st Century?

This is a wonderful book. You shouldn't reject this book based upon your opinion of its subject. The books is written very well and evokes enough of the times in which Taylor lived to give us a more nuanced portrait of the man within the context of his world.

Nowadays, F.W. Taylor is often portrayed as either a villain who has all but enslaved us or he is defended as not really meaning what he said. Instead, this book shows us Taylor's nineteenth century upper middle-class background and spends a good amount of time on character development and work habits.

Once all this is understood, Taylor's seemingly obsessive goals become more understandable. He did have many important insights in making work efficient. When he began manufacturing was done in thousands of very small shops. It was horribly inefficient. His work did help our economy and helped the average worker become more productive. However, I still can't understand how someone could think having a human body physically haul 47 tons of pig iron per day is a good thing. There is a definite quality of life aspect that still wasn't grasped by these early efficiency experts.

Another extremely valuable topic the author clarifies is that Henry Ford's assembly line had more to do with meatpacking than Taylor's Scientific Management. Taylor's critics have unjustly used Henry Ford's manufacturing techniques as evidence against Taylor's methods when Ford himself made statements denying Taylor's influence. Also, like many original thinkers, Taylor was ill served by many who came after him and used his name but not his methods. This is all clearly laid out in this valuable book.

This isn't a whitewash or a book of simple praise. It paints a complex portrait of Taylor, but gives us enough context to understand him within his time. We get to know something of his character and that helps a great deal. It is a big book but reads short and is surprisingly engaging for a book on manufacturing. This book gave me insights into the early twentieth century that I needed to make certain pieces fall into place. It has a prominent place in my library and I hope a lot of people read it.