VeraSage

The One Best Way: Frederick Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

Ron Baker - 08/16/2011

The world’s first and most famous preacher of the efficiency gospel was Frederick Winslow Taylor, born on March 20, 1856, into a prominent Quaker family in an upper-middle-class suburb of Philadelphia.

His ideas permeate our thinking to this day, a classic example of a thinker of whom Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “a hundred years after he is dead and forgotten, men who never heard of him will be moving to the measure of his thought.”

Today, if you work in a professional firm, you are still moving to the measure of this man’s thought. Peter Drucker wrote that Taylor’s Scientific Management (SM) idea is perhaps “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.”

Robert Kanigel has written a scholarly, well-balanced, book on Taylor’s life. At over 600 pages, it is not an easy read, so I thought I’d provide a review, albeit long, that synthesizes the work of Taylor as well as this enigma known as “efficiency.”

Taylorism Defined—Sort of

Taylor set out to prove that management is “a true science” with “laws as exact, and as clearly defined...as the fundamental principles of engineering.”

Thus Taylorism can be defined as:

The application of scientific methods to the problem of obtaining maximum efficiency in industrial work or the like.

To his credit, he viewed knowledge as the prime productive resource. The problem is he thought the knowledge only existed among management, not the workers, and that the system would embed the knowledge, saying in 1911: “In the past the man has been first. In the future the System must be first.” He separated the doing from the thinking.

Economists of the day coined the term “Deskilling,” the idea that knowledge lies with management, not the workers. Taylor, in effect, help create the white-collar workforce.

Taylor wasn’t as interested in how long a job took, but rather how long it should take. He searched for the ideal human performance. Work consisted of discrete pieces, each of which could timed and studied to maximize speed.

He began work at Midvale Steel in 1878, where he became an industrial engineer, testing his time theories on the factory floor among his coworkers.

He pleaded, cajoled, and even fined workers, creating a shop full of resentment. He believed a 35% pay increase was necessary to induce workers to extraordinary efforts, even more for some types of work, such as 70-80%, or even a doubling.

But how do you get workers to work faster? Pay them. Accumulative rates, Taylor called it the differential rate: you earned an amount that depended on your output for the whole day: thirty-five cents per piece, say, for producing less than what Taylor’s science decreed, fifty cents for exceeding it. And you earned the fifty cents for the whole output, not just the amount exceeding the first tier.

The Spread of Taylorism

After he left Midvale, Taylor became a “management consultant” in the 1890s, charging $35 per day (approximately $1,000 today).

He presented a paper on June 23, 1903 at the 47th meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers titled “Shop Management.” In it, he laid out time-and-motion studies, including a sketch of a decimal-dial stopwatch.

With the notoriety this paper achieved, SM came to be described as a religion, with Taylor the messiah, attracting both disciples and apostles, and the rest becoming members of the church.

A writer to the New York Times asked: “And didn’t the legal profession need some science, too?” ...get Mr. Taylor to take a few stop watch observations in a typical court, and in a typical lawyer’s office, and make an estimate of the existing and obtainable efficiencies.”

Sound familiar? The father of both the timesheet and the billable hour, Reginald Heber Smith, was greatly influenced by “Speedy Taylor,” as evidenced by his writing “Efficiency and economy are a race against time.”

Taylor’s champions included Louis Brandeis, “the People’s Lawyer,” and Ida Tarbell, the legendary muckraking journalist. Henry L. Gantt—known for his eponymous chart—was a disciple of Taylor.

Frank Gilbreth, a former bricklayer, read the 1903 paper and became a disciple, calling the paper “a work of genius.” Gilbreth was even more obsessed with motions than was Taylor, and 2 of his 12 children later wrote a portrait of him titled Cheaper by the Dozen, later made into a Hollywood movie with Clifton Webb as Gilbreth.

If Taylor was idiosyncratic, Gilbreth was an even stranger duck, as David Boyle humorously points out in The Sum of Our Discontent:

Gilbreth was obsessed with measuring, breaking down every manual operation into what he called “therbligs” (Gilbreth spelled backward). He buttoned his vest from the bottom up because it took four seconds less than buttoning it from the top down. He cut 17 seconds off his shaving time by using two brushes. Using two shavers cut 44 seconds, but then he cut himself and had to spend another two minutes looking for a plaster.

But it wasn’t until 1910 that he became known across the country, thanks to the efforts of one of his disciples—Louis Brandeis.

Taylor Becomes Famous

In November 1910, a group of powerful railroads petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) for a $27 million rate increase. Lawyer Louis Brandeis, whom Woodrow Wilson would appoint to Supreme Court 6 years later, submitted “The Brandeis Brief.”

He claimed the railroads could save a million dollars per day if they followed Taylor’s SM System, so the rate increase was unnecessary. Brandeis asked a railroad executive a very unscientific question:

What evidence have you that these costs however they may be made up, represent not merely what was actually paid, but what should have been paid?

This is a stupid question, since all “costs” are themselves “prices,” with their own value assessments. The ICC ultimately denied the rate increase, but not because of Brandeis $1M per day savings assertion, which it deemed only a theory.

But it didn’t matter, for the $1 million savings per day was splashed on the headlines of newspapers across the country, turning the relative obscure Frederick Taylor into a person of curiosity.

People flocked to his 12,000-square foot home in the Philadelphia suburb of Chestnut Hill, which he called “Boxly,” to hear his ideas.

These “Boxly Talks” were then turned into a book in 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management, the In Search of Excellence of the 1910s. Two of Taylor’s principles are worth noting:

...[T]he workman who is best suited to actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity.

...[A]lmost every act of the workman should be preceded by one or more preparatory acts of the management which enable him to do his work better and quicker than he otherwise could.

This advice seems crude and unenlightened in today’s knowledge economy, and organized labor viewed Taylorism as nothing more than a method to extract more sweat from labor, turning workers into impersonal slaves.

In 1915, Congress passed legislation, which stayed on the books until 1949, banning Taylor’s beloved stopwatches from government factories. But while government eschewed Taylorism, the private sector embraced it—and does to this day.

Unscientific Management

Any approach claiming to be “scientific” has to include a crucial element: verifiability. Yet Taylor never supplied the data or the methods that would allow others to reproduce and verify his results.

As Matthew Stewart points out in his seminal book, The Management Myth:

Instead of science, Taylor offered a kind of parody of science. He confused the paraphernalia of research—stopwatches and long division—with actual research.

One can go grocery shopping with a scientific attitude. But it does not follow that there is a science of grocery shopping.

Even Taylor himself would say repeatedly that his system had not emerged full-blown as a theory, but that it had bubbled up from the cauldron of shop experience:

Scientific management at every step has been an evolution not a theory. In all cases the practice had preceded the theory.

Of course, that’s the problem—it’s not a falsifiable theory, nor is it correct, since there’s no such thing as generic efficiency, as economists have pointed out for centuries but businesspeople—especially Lean and Six-Sigma types—continuously ignore.

Taylor’s statements were essentially tautologies, such as “work smarter not harder,” and “an efficient shop is more productive than an inefficient shop.” These are not scientific, verifiable hypotheses, but simply nonfalsifiable platitudes.

Taylor’s own work at Midvale Steel did not increase production beyond the average before his arrival. Bethlehem Steel tried his “System.” It failed, created labor unrest, and Taylor was fired. These facts were later sanitized from his work history.

Taylor was a master at taking modest successes and blowing them up into major accomplishments. Much of his touted increases in efficiency were simply the learning curve and new technology in practice. His taking credit for these natural improvements is similar to the rooster crowing and taking credit for the sun rising.

There were management consultants who criticized Taylorism, concluding “there was nothing tangible behind it.” C. Bertrand Thompson explained how loose and ill-defined a concept Taylorism had become:

As the number of those talking and writing about Scientific Management has increased, the principles have become vaguer and the spirit more tenuous, until now they are taken to cover every supposed improvement in managerial practice. I have myself seen the installation of an adding machine, or even of a telephone, referred to as “Taylorization.”

In other words, Taylor was a fraud. He claimed to bring science to the study of work, management, and efficiency, but no such science could ever be replicated.

Scientific Management is not science, nor is it a religion. It’s a business. Today’s Lean and Six-Sigma belts carry on the tradition, all the while impervious to the idea—suggested by Stephen Covey—that we are efficient with things, but effective with people.

Ridicule vs. Logic

Ridicule is often a more effective way to persuade people than logic, and Taylorism received its fair share. One of the funniest was Nelson Algren’s character Highpockets, a hardworking “hillbilly from way back at the fork of the crick”:

The time-study man, that mother-robbing creeper that watches you from behind dolly trucks and stock boxes, he’s always trying to figger a way to get more work out of you at the same pay. He’ll even ask you if they ain’t some way you could do a little more than you are. He never expects you should say yes.

But Highpockets does say yes. Let him run another machine with his left hand. Soon he’s turning out twice as much as before, which spurs the time-study man to new depths of fiendish ingenuity. Soon a block and tackle is attached to Highpocket’s right leg, and then a band to his left leg with which to pick things off a conveyor.

Finally, with a rod stuck between his teeth, he’s jerking his head back and forth to run something else. The time-study man is thrilled, and Highpockets has caught the spirit. “If you want to stick a broom someplace,” he cries, leaving scant doubt where “someplace” is, I think I could be sweeping the floor.

In his autobiography, Peter Falk (R.I.P.) reveals how he began his acting career:

I quit my job. I was working for the Budget Director of the State of Connecticut as an efficiency expert (the truth is the first day on the job I couldn’t find the office—it was in the state capitol—I ended up in the post office).

Was Columbo efficient? Did you care?

An Early Ending

Frank Gilbreth eventually went on to repudiate the validity of time-and-motion studies as unethical and “absolutely worthless.” In the meantime, Taylor pressed on, espousing his platitudes until his final day.

On March 9, 1915 Taylor was admitted to the hospital with pneumonia. Every morning Taylor arose out of bed to wind his precious watch.

One day after his 59th birthday, March 21, a nurse saw him winding his watch uncharacteristically early, 4:30 A.M. When she returned a half hour later, Taylor was dead.

He’s buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, high over Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, with a gravestone proclaiming “the father of scientific management.”

Many of the so-called efficiency experts met an early death—which makes you wonder what, exactly, were they saving all that time for?