Taylorism. It is sometimes argued that Taylorism has made the most lasting contribution to
American thought since the Federalist Papers. Taylorism, you might ask? Chances are you live and work by it.
Tonight, the extraordinary impact of Frederick Winslow Taylor.
. At the turn of the century, when the industrial
revolution hit its stride and was beginning to change everything, Frederick Winslow Taylor
became convinced that one machine could turn into an economic powerhouse: the stopwatch.
Frederick Taylor was the first efficiency expert. He came into the factories of the
industrial northeast and changed them. Machines had already changed the mills of the 19th
century, but the workers who ran them clung to the old ways of doing things. Trades were
learned literally from watching another laborer. Workers were paid for piece work and were
loath to work any faster lest the bosses lower the rate.
Frederick Taylor thought the system was ridiculously inefficient. He was the first person to come
along and say, we can treat work as a science just as we can anything else. We can analyze
it, we can tear it apart and reconstruct it in a new, more efficient way.
Taylor was born into Philadelphia's Quaker aristocracy. He was born rich. His father
never worked a day in his life. Taylor was accepted by Harvard, but he did not go. Instead,
he learned about factories, how to read mechanical drawings, how to be a machinist. He became
a consultant for America's steel industry when he convinced the mill owners that he
could speed up production . They worked and Taylor watched, and he timed.
He timed everything. Every job was broken up into tasks, each task timed with an eye
to efficiency. Taylor determined that coal shovelers were most efficient lifting exactly
twenty-one and a half pounds, and he designed the perfect, most efficient shovel and a schedule
of how many lifts each worker should do every minute of every hour. Then they could rest.
Productivity soared. The workers hated him. He deprived workers of control over the work
place, over their tools, and over the use of their bodies.
Taylor couldn't understand the animosity. He thought surely that more productivity would
lead to happier workers who were better paid. By 19 11 when he published his Principles
of Scientific Management, the enthusiasm for Taylor's ideas had grown. In its division
of labor and insistence on speed, Henry Ford's assembly line followed Taylor's principles.
Before long, Taylorism was felt everywhere: how to type faster, how to perform surgery
faster. By the 1930s, Taylor's ideas of efficiency were even making themselves felt in the family
kitchen. An efficiently planned kitchen frees the
housewife from fatigue. But organized labor was never happy with Taylor, even Hollywood
was wondering where it might all lead. Taylor's one best way of doing things organized efficiency
became central to the conduct of business in the 20th century. You can see it today
on the assembly lines which produce our cars, or computers, our cheeseburgers, even our
coffee. New ideas have appeared in the managerial
field, but none of them have had the influence of Frederick W. Taylor.
That would have pleased Taylor. He never knew the full extent of his influence. He became
ill and died in 1915 at the age of 59. It is said that the last thing he did before
he died was wind his watch.