The Principles of Scientific Management – Frederick Winslow Taylor

“We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient…are but vaguely appreciated.”

Which would you prefer? Good pay, but a job where every detail is spelled out for you, with no chance for autonomy or individuality, or worse pay, but a job where you can use your personal expertise to make a difference to the result? That question lies at the heart of your judgment of the Scientific Management.

I’d hate to speculate how many (or few) management consultants have read it, but Scientific Management is a seminal work in the field, quite possibly a founding work. Taylor argues that progress requires management to become more scientific: that the traditional knowledge of workers must be studied and tabulated by management, and narrow, well-defined tasks should be given to workers, with every aspect detailed. Managers shouldn’t just ask workers to carry pig iron: they should specify how far, how heavy a load, how long to rest, how often, and method of lifting.

Some of Taylor’s suggestions seem reasonable to modern ears: he recommends frequent breaks for workers and limits on hours, for example, so that workers can “work while they work” and “play while they play.” More fundamentally, one of his core suggestions is simply to gather data, which I certainly wouldn’t disagree with: finding the best weight someone can shovel without hurting their back is an experiment anyone who has shoveled snow can support.

Where Taylor runs into trouble is the extreme centralization of knowledge his system requires. As Shop Class as Soul Craft can tell you, such a reduction of worker responsibility can be dehumanizing, and long run it’s hard to believe anyone can perform well when they feel like a cog in a machine they do not understand. To be picky, his experiments are also terribly run, and the results are almost entirely attributable to selection bias, since he fires anyone who doesn’t perform: clearly average performance increases then, but it need not have anything to do with management methods.

Still, the book is worth reading, particularly if you plan to talk to MBAs very often. Even if you don’t, Taylor provides a frank commentary on how he sees the problem of management, and perhaps particularly if you disagree, it’s useful as a way to figure out what you think might work best.