Thinker

Frederick Winslow Taylor

He timed steelworkers to hundredths of a minute.

Engineer and management theorist, 1856–1915

In 1898, at the Bethlehem Steel plant in Pennsylvania, Frederick Winslow Taylor selected a Dutch immigrant named Henry Noll and offered him a proposition. If Noll followed Taylor’s instructions exactly, moving when told, resting when told, picking up a pig of iron and walking where directed, he could earn $1.85 per day instead of the standard $1.15.1

Taylor had spent years conducting time studies with a stopwatch, measuring the motions of workers and determining the most efficient sequence of movements for each task. He called this approach scientific management.2

The core principle was the separation of planning from execution. Managers would study each task, determine the optimal method, and issue instructions. Workers would follow those instructions without deviation. Taylor wrote that workers should not be asked to think about what they were doing, only to perform what they were told.3

His 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, became one of the most influential management texts ever published. Its ideas spread from steel mills to factories to offices. By the 1920s, scientific management had been adopted by manufacturers worldwide.4

370%

Annual worker turnover at Ford’s Highland Park plant in 1913, before the five-dollar day

Henry Ford applied Taylor’s principles to the assembly line, breaking automobile production into repetitive tasks timed to the second. Worker turnover at Ford’s Highland Park plant reached 370 percent in 1913. Ford responded not by changing the work, but by raising wages to five dollars a day, enough to make workers accept conditions they would otherwise leave.5

Taylor testified before the U.S. Congress in 1912 after a strike at the Watertown Arsenal, where workers rebelled against time studies being applied to their tasks. Congress investigated but did not ban the practice.6

Taylor died of pneumonia in 1915, at the age of fifty-nine. His gravestone in Philadelphia reads, "Father of Scientific Management." Peter Drucker later described Taylor’s influence as comparable to Darwin and Freud, noting that scientific management was the most powerful contribution America had made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.7

Timeline

1898

Taylor conducts pig-iron handling experiments at Bethlehem Steel, timing workers’ motions with a stopwatch.

1911

The Principles of Scientific Management is published, arguing that planning should be separated from execution.

1912

Taylor testifies before Congress after workers at the Watertown Arsenal strike over time studies.

1915

Taylor dies at fifty-nine. His gravestone reads “Father of Scientific Management.”

Endnotes

1 Robert Kanigel, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (New York: Viking, 1997).

2 Frederick Winslow Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1911).

3 Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management.

4 Daniel Nelson, Frederick W. Taylor and the Rise of Scientific Management (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980).

5 Stephen Meyer, The Five Dollar Day: Labor Management and Social Control in the Ford Motor Company, 1908–1921 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1981), 95–112.

6 Kanigel, The One Best Way.

7 Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management (New York: Harper and Row, 1954).