Frederick Taylor

Taylor began his career as an apprentice machinist in Philadelphia in 1875 and rose to chief engineer at Midvale Steel by his early thirties. What distinguished him from other engineers was his obsession with measuring human labor the way one would measure a machine. At Midvale, he introduced time studies in 1881, breaking each task into its smallest components and timing each with a stopwatch, searching for what he called the one best way to perform any given job.

At Bethlehem Steel between 1898 and 1901, Taylor conducted his most famous experiments. He studied shovelers and discovered that the optimal shovel load was twenty-one and a half pounds, regardless of the material being moved. He redesigned shovels for different materials so that each scoop would hit that weight. Output per worker doubled. In his pig iron experiments, Taylor selected individual workers, prescribed their exact movements and rest intervals, and increased daily output from twelve and a half tons per man to forty-seven and a half, while raising the selected worker's pay from one dollar and fifteen cents to one dollar and eighty-five cents per day.

Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, arguing that every act of every workman can be reduced to a science. The book was voted the most influential management text of the twentieth century by the Academy of Management in 2001. Its core principle, that planning should be separated from execution, that managers should think and workers should do, became the organizational logic of the modern corporation. The resistance was immediate. Complaints that Taylorism was dehumanizing led to a congressional investigation, and stopwatch studies provoked strikes at factories where they were introduced.

Taylor died in 1915 at age fifty-nine. The principles he articulated, standardized methods, measured performance, the separation of thinking from doing, outlived him by more than a century and remain embedded in the structure of most workplaces.