The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency. - book reviews

Reason, Jan, 1998 by Brink Lindsey

It's fashionable these days to dismiss the industrial era as a kind of Dark Ages from which, thanks to the integrated circuit, we have only just emerged. In this caricature of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, father of "scientific management," figures as one of the chief villains. His hierarchical control systems and treatment of workers as brainless interchangeable parts stand in diametric opposition to the flattened organizations and "knowledge workers" that are touted by today's management gurus.

Of course, caricatures are based on actual (and usually unattractive) features. And Taylor makes an inviting target: Much of his influence has indeed been godawful. But the full story is much more complicated, and much more interesting. A balanced look at his life and times reveals not a villain but a tragic hero. His innovations ushered in enormous productivity gains, which brought unprecedented affluence to the United States and the nations that followed its lead; at the same time, though, Taylor's system employed methods that misunderstood, and thereby grievously undermined, the full promise of the new mass production economy. It is fair to say that Frederick Taylor's career exemplified the Industrial Revolution he helped to lead: a mixture of beneficent achievements and malign shortcomings.

Robert Kanigel's The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency tells Taylor's story comprehensively and fairly. The length of the book is somewhat forbidding, and in some sections excessive. Kanigel clearly immersed himself in his subject, and at times he is too eager to make sure we know it. Despite the page count, the book is highly readable and on the whole richly rewards the reader's investment of time. If you want to understand the history of American political economy during the 20th century, you really need to know about Frederick Taylor; he is, for good and ill, one of our founding fathers.

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born in 1856 to a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker family. Until the age of 18, he appeared destined to follow in his father's footsteps as a gentleman of leisure, dividing time between philanthropic projects and managing inherited wealth. Toward this end Taylor had prepped at the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, receiving a traditional classical education, and was poised to enter Harvard. At this point, though, his life took a sharp and unexpected turn: For reasons that remain obscure, he decided to forsake Harvard for a career in industry. In 1874, the training he needed generally wasn't taught in universities; instead, Taylor signed on as an apprentice at a small Philadelphia pump works.

Four years later, his apprenticeship complete, he got a job as a laborer in the machine shop of Midvale Steel. He spent 12 years there, rising quickly through the ranks, first to foreman and ultimately to chief engineer. (In his spare time, it should be mentioned, he and his partner won a doubles title at the U.S. Open Tennis Championship.) At Midvale, he developed and put into place the basic elements of what later came to be known as "scientific management": the breakdown of work tasks into constituent elements; the timing of each element based on repeated stopwatch studies; the fixing of piece rate compensation based on those studies; standardization of work tasks on detailed instruction cards; and generally, the systematic consolidation of the shop floor's brain work in a "planning department."

From Midvale, Taylor went on to become one of the world's first management consultants, his business card proclaiming, "Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty." Around the turn of the century, Taylor did his last prolonged stint as a corporate employee, spending three years with Bethlehem Iron (later Steel). At Bethlehem, Taylor recorded two great achievements: first, the development with a colleague of a new "high speed" tool steel, a material that allowed machine tools to cut metal at three to four times the previous speeds; and second, the systematization of years of metal-cutting experiments into a special slide rule for calculating machine speed and feed. Both were landmark engineering breakthroughs; putting aside Taylor's management theories, they would have sufficed to make him an important figure in the history of American industrialization.

But Taylor was to become known as much more than an engineer. After leaving Bethlehem - being forced out, more accurately - he more or less retired from day-to-day work. He became instead an evangelist for his management ideas, offering private seminars to corporate leaders from his Philadelphia home. Worldwide fame came in 1910 as a result of a railroad rate increase dispute before the Interstate Commerce Commission. Crusading lawyer (and later Supreme Court Justice) Louis Brandeis, who represented interests opposed to the rate increase, based his argument on Taylor's management system, which he dubbed "scientific management." Brandeis claimed that if the railroads adopted Taylor's methods, they could save a million dollars a day: They didn't need a rate increase; they needed greater efficiency.