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Frederick Winslow Taylor: One Hundred Years of Managerial Insight

2011; Globeedu Group; Volume: 28; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

2277-5846

Anne M. Blake, James L. Moseley,

Management Theory and Practice

One hundred years ago, the publication of a small book set off an international firestorm. The book's author, Frederick Winslow Taylor, is widely recognized as a founder of the modern management movement. His fiery personality and radical approach to business made him a popular yet controversial figure in the United States. However, it was the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911 (Harper and Brothers: New York) that catapulted Frederick Taylor to international fame. Almost overnight, business leaders around the world became obsessed with discovering the one best way to do every job. One hundred years later, the influence of the very first business best-seller has trickled into every type of industry in every corner of the world. To celebrate the centennial of the book's publication it is worthwhile to take a look back at this remarkable man, his little book that changed the world, and his dubious distinction of founding Taylorism. The Life and Accomplishments of Frederick Taylor Frederick Taylor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on March 20, 1 856. His family was wealthy, although they lived plainly, in accordance with the principles of their Quaker religion. As a child, Taylor spent more than three years traveling throughout Europe with his parents. When he returned to the United States, he attended a prestigious boarding school and planned to attend Harvard University until problems with his eyesight caused him to end his formal education. Instead, he found a job as an apprentice patternmaker at a small pump-manufacturing firm in Philadelphia (Kanigel, 1996). Taylor later wrote I look back upon the first six months of my apprenticeship as a patternmaker as, on the whole, the most valuable part of my education (Kanigel, 1996, p. 49). At the conclusion of his apprenticeship, Taylor used family connections to secure a job at Midvale Steel Works as a machine shop laborer. He was quickly promoted to machinist and then to gang boss. It was in this capacity that he first became involved in overseeing the work of other employees (Kanigel, 1996). Taylor received additional promotions over the course of the next few years, holding the job titles of maintenance foreman, shop disciplinarian, master mechanic, chief draftsman, research director, and chief engineer (Kanigel, 1 997). By watching the men who worked for him, Taylor became interested in the process of work itself. He noticed that the culture of the shop encouraged soldiering, or the purposeful slowing down of work to an easy pace. Taylor pushed the workers to speed up in order to maximize output. They responded by slowing down further. Taylor made repeated attempts to cajole and threaten the workers, which only served to increase their animosity while decreasing their output. Finally, Taylor turned to rational scientific inquiry as a solution to his personnel problems. He began a series of experiments aimed at breaking down each job into its functional elements. Using a stopwatch and a clipboard Taylor introduced time-andmotion studies to the factory. While these experiments were unsuccessful at improving Taylor's relationships with the factory7 workers, they did eventually revolutionize the world of work. While Taylor worked long days performing his experiments in the factory, he also had an amazingly productive personal life. In 1881, Taylor won the first doubles tennis tournament at the U.S. National Championship, now referred to as the U.S. Open, with Clarence Clark. In 1883, he earned a degree in mechanical engineering through an unusual correspondence program with Stevens Institute of Technology (Kanigel, 1997). During his lifetime, Taylor applied for and received more than 40 patents for a wide range of products, including a device that maintains tautness in a tennis net, a spoon shaped tennis racket, a Y-shaped two-handled putter for golf, a new kind of railroad car wheel, a steam hammer, a boring and turning mill, and a device that was designed to move growing trees (Kanigel, 1997). …