The Principles of Scientific Management
Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1911
Why do people deliberately work slower than they can, and why can that be sensible? The engineer Frederick Taylor timed work with a stopwatch and showed how a loader, a labourer with a shovel and a bricklayer could each do several times as much without wearing themselves out. A classic from 1911 about the efficiency of labour, with its discoveries and its limit.
Who it is for
For people who feel they work a lot but get little done, and who want to understand where effort is lost and how to find it.
In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.
A new foreman against an unwritten norm
In 1878 Frederick Taylor came to the machine shop of the Midvale company as a plain labourer, because after a long slump there was no work in his trade. Soon he was at a lathe, turning out more than his neighbours, and within a few months he had become a foreman. The shop ran on piece-rate pay, for each part, but the pace had long been set by the workers themselves: each worker gave about a third of what he could. As soon as Taylor was promoted, the men came to him one after another with a warning: stick with us and all will be well; start cutting the rates and we will throw you over the fence.
He replied that he was now on the side of management, and a war began. For three years he dismissed the stubborn, cut the rates and taught the newcomers himself. In return the machines seemed to break by accident, and the blame fell on the foreman. Friends asked him not to walk home alone in the evening along the railway. In the end output rose, in many cases twofold. But when the same friends asked whether it was worth their working harder, he answered honestly: in your place I would resist too, because under such a system you get the same money for harder work.
The system that Taylor described in “The Principles of Scientific Management” in 1911 grew out of that war. Taylor asks a question familiar to anyone who works: why does so much effort go to waste, and what can be done about it? His answer is not to look for a rare genius or to push people harder. First one must learn how the work is really done, find the best way of doing it, and share the responsibility between the one who manages and the one who does the work.
What follows is about a pig-iron loader who was taught to rest in good time, a shovel that carries exactly 21 pounds, about nine and a half kilograms, bricklayers who make a third as many unnecessary movements, and inspectors who get more done in a shorter day. At the end there is an honest talk about where Taylor's method reaches its limit.
Why slow work can pay
Taylor describes a worker whom he timed himself. On the way to the works the man walked at five or six kilometres an hour, and in the evening he often ran home at a jog. At work he slowed at once to about one and a half kilometres an hour. He pushed a loaded barrow quickly, even uphill, to spend as little time as possible under the load, but walked back slowly and seized any excuse to linger. He worked so hard not to do more than his lazy neighbour that he tired himself out with the very slowness.
Americans call this soldiering: working deliberately slower than you can. Taylor distinguishes two kinds. Natural soldiering grows from the ordinary wish not to exert oneself. Far more dangerous is systematic soldiering, which people organise on purpose and by calculation. A twelve-year-old caddy on a golf course explained to a newcomer that one must walk slowly: you are paid by the hour, and the faster you walk, the less you get. And if you hurry, the other boys will beat you up.
Adults reason in the same way. The master keeps in mind the ceiling of what a worker of his grade should earn. Once a man makes more, the rate per piece is cut, so there is more work for the same money. After two or three such cuts, Taylor writes, the worker firmly decides never to allow it again. Older hands teach the young not to set records, and honest men are forced to pretend, while the boss becomes their opponent.
Taylor names three causes of soldiering. The first is the belief that if everyone produces more, there will not be enough work for all. He answers with the history of shoes. When they began to be made by machine, shoes became cheaper. The working man, instead of buying one pair in five years, began to buy one or two a year, and more people than before were employed in the shoe trade. The second cause is a system of management in which slowing down pays. The third is working by rule of thumb, when each man does things as he has seen his neighbour do them.
Hence an unexpected conclusion. Soldiering cannot be beaten by calls to work more honestly: while the system punishes speed, slowing down is sensible. The system itself must change, and the change must start with precise knowledge of how much work really fits into a day.
About the author
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American engineer. He began as a labourer in the Midvale works, rose to foreman, and for almost thirty years introduced in factories the system he called scientific management.
All books by this author: Frederick Winslow Taylor
Terms from the book
- Thompson
- time study
- piece-rate pay
- Gilbreth
- Midvale: Midvale Steel, a steel company in the United States where Taylor worked from 1878 as a labourer, lathe operator, gang boss and foreman, and where he began his experiments.
- soldiering: Deliberately slow work, so as not to do more than is expected. This is Taylor's own word, which he divides into natural and systematic soldiering.
- caddy: A golf player's assistant who carries his clubs around the course.
- Bethlehem: Bethlehem Steel, a large steel company in the American state of Pennsylvania, where Taylor introduced his system at the turn of the twentieth century.
- pig: A bar of cast pig iron. At Bethlehem Steel one pig weighed about 92 pounds, roughly 42 kilograms.
- pound: An English unit of weight, about 454 grams.
- Schmidt: The name Taylor gives in the book to the pig-iron loader from Bethlehem Steel who was the first to work to his instructions.
- rice coal: A fine grade of coal, its grains about the size of rice; a very light and slippery load for a shovel.
- Pittsburgh: An industrial city in Pennsylvania, at that time one of the main centres of American metallurgy.
- scaffold: A low platform for work at height, on which the bricklayer and his materials stand.
- personal coefficient: A term from the physiological experiments of the time: the interval from the moment a person sees a signal to his response. A low coefficient means a quick reaction.
All terms
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