The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Sloan Technology) [Hardcover]

Robert Kanigel (Author)

Book Description

Series: Sloan Technology | Publication Date: May 1, 1997

The story of the man who influenced both Henry Ford and Vladimar Lenin profiles efficiency expert Frederick Winslow Taylor, a man who felt he could bring prosperity to everyone and abolish class hatred through raising wages and increasing ""efficiency.""

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Though not nearly as well known as Ford or Edison, Frederick Winslow Taylor's influence on the modern age is no less significant; management guru Peter Drucker calls Taylor "the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." Although Taylor's name may have been forgotten by the masses, the management practices he implemented have become the worldwide standard for efficiency. Taylor invented what became known as "Scientific Management," or simply "Taylorism," an approach to organizing factories and offices that placed workers within a rigid system designed for maximum productivity. Taylor broke down the machinery and management of industrialization, measuring each movement with stopwatch precision to deduce how the whole could operate more efficiently. A man perfectly suited to his times, he lived during the peak of the Industrial Revolution, providing him a grand stage for displaying his ideas. Today his legacy may be viewed by some as a sort of curse; the modern workplace he helped to create pits employees in a race against the clock, virtual slaves to a system created nearly a century ago. The One Best Way is a fascinating history of the man who revolutionized the way we do business and, in turn, the way we live.

From Library Journal

In 1995, the Safelite Glass Corporation moved from hourly to piece-rate pay for its workers and realized a productivity increase of 20 percent per worker. After over 100 years, the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a management expert who emphasized such an approach to paying workers, still permeates the American work force. Kanigel (Apprentice to Genius, Johns Hopkins Univ., 1993) brings his winning writing style to this treatment of the enigmatic Taylor?often called the "father of scientific management"?whom Peter Drucker has said warrants a place alongside Darwin and Freud in the making of the modern world. Kanigel deftly shies away from a psychologically interpretive approach, drawing the reader right into the heart of life in late-19th-century America, the age of steam and steel (Taylor died in 1915). This rewarding and beautifully written work is a shoo-in as a best business book and will likely stand as the definitive work on Taylor. Essential.?Dale F. Farris, Groves, Tex.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 656 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; First Edition edition (May 1, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670864021
• ISBN-13: 978-0670864027
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 2.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #626,221 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Robert Kanigel was born in Brooklyn, NY, but for most of his adult life has lived in Baltimore, MD, where he lives today. He has written seven books, on wildly differing subjects. His second, "The Man Who Knew Infinity," was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist, a Los Angeles book Prize finalist, a New York Public Library "Book to Remember," and has been translated into Italian, German, Greek, Chinese, and other languages. His latest book, for which he was named recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, is "On an Irish Island," set on a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 600 pages on a guy who had one good idea, May 14, 2001

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Sloan Technology) (Paperback)

For anyone who has worked - on an assembly line, as a bureaucrat-in-a-box - the greatest workplace nemesis is a nonexistent ideal: the theoretical person against whom your "efficiency" is measured. Often, not even a boss or office rival is as irritating as this cold standard, the product of stopwatch-wielding efficiency experts and industrial psychologists who claim to have a scientific measure of "average output." In The One Best Way, science writer Robert Kanigel examines the first so-called efficiency expert of them all: Frederick Taylor, the turn-of-the-century engineer and pioneering management consultant.

Taylor's idea was simple: break down all jobs into their smallest component tasks, experiment to determine the best way to accomplish them and how fast they can be performed, and then find the right workers to do them. It was called scientific management, or "Taylorism" -- a formula to maximize the productivity of industrial workers. "The coming of Taylorism," Kanigel writes, took "currents of thought drifting through his own time -- standards, order, production, regularity, efficiency -- and codif[ied] them into a system that defines our age."

Though he had an enormous impact on our everyday lives, today Taylor is little known outside management circles. This is curious: in his own time, Taylor was a world-class celebrity, advocating an organizational revolution that would link harder work to higher wages -- as well as instituting shorter working hours and regular "cigarette breaks." His books and articles were translated into all the major languages and passionately studied, even in the Soviet Union, as guides to a future industrial utopia; he was, in many ways, Stalin's prophet. Yet Taylor was also reviled as a slave driver who devalued skilled labor and despised the common worker, and he was ridiculed as a failure in many of his business undertakings.

Much of Kanigel's book is devoted to descriptions of the shops that Taylor worked in: a ball-bearing factory, a paper mill, and machine-tool plants, to name a few. It's dramatic how different the world he describes is from the work environment of today. Here were no highly educated managers attempting to exercise minute control over relatively unskilled employees. Instead, craftsmen dominated these oily pits -- spinning steel-cutting lathes, constructing elaborate sand molds for machine tools, and maintaining the gigantic leather belts that harnessed the energy of central steam engines. THis was in many ways the most fascinating part of the book for me: I learned what people did in the decaying mills that surrounded my New England home.

To all but the most practiced eye, such a workplace was a chaotic scene. What the craftsmen did -- and what they were capable of -- was largely a mystery to management, which deprived the managers of control and power, leading to a number of stunningly counterproductive practices. If tool and die makers produced jigs beyond a certain threshold, for example, 19th-century foremen would dock (!) their pay per item -- an obvious incentive for them to slow down. And because ball-bearing inspectors in a Fitchburg mill worked slowly and talked too much, they were forced to put in 101/2 -hour days, without breaks.

Taylor witnessed such practices and decided to change them. In one of his most famous experiments, on "Schmidt", he got a common laborer to double the number of bars of pig iron he transported down a plank each day. All he did was pay the man more, linking higher output directly to higher wages -- hardly a revolutionary thought today. His solution for the gossipy ball-bearing inspectors was to separate them, shorten their working hours, increase their pay, and allow them to relax occasionally; in return, they were expected to work harder, and they did.

Once Kanigel establishes that Taylor's method worked well (to a certain extent), the book becomes tough going. Despite his elegant prose, Kanigel's exhaustive treatment of his subject's life and experiments strained my interest. Do we really need to know, for example, that Taylor once spent months alternating the size of coal shovels in the name of furnace-stoking efficiency? Or the entire list of his vacation companions for one summer? Such biographical detail can add spice to a compelling narrative, but to include them only as an exercise in thoroughness, as Kanigel does, is simply tiring. Taylor simply is not interesting as a personality.

Kanigel also glosses over many important issues. Taylorism really did devalue certian kind sof skilled labor, and the costs have been high. The "Taylorized" doctors of the HMO era, for example, must work with administrators peeking over their shoulders, dispensing pills at the expense of empathy and other unmeasurable healing skills. And once factory workers lost their control and even their comprehension of manufacturing processes, many ceased to take pride in their work and stopped making suggestions for improvement. This may be one reason why Japanese and European design is often superior to American. Taylorism also spawned the rise of management consulting, with its sham exercises and goals -- often a huge diversion of managerial talent in the name of efficiency. Kanigel, however, largely ignores this darker side of Taylorism; the true impact of his legacy gets lost in the details. The result is a 600-page profile of a narrow and compulsive man with a single, if influential, idea.

Recommended, but only for scholars and specialists.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fredrick Winslow Taylor in context and portrayed honestly, May 27, 2002

By 

Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Sloan Technology) (Paperback)

This is a wonderful book. You shouldn't reject this book based upon your opinion of its subject. The books is written very well and evokes enough of the times in which Taylor lived to give us a more nuanced portrait of the man within the context of his world.

Nowadays, F.W. Taylor is often portrayed as either a villain who has all but enslaved us or he is defended as not really meaning what he said. Instead, this book shows us Taylor's nineteenth century upper middle-class background and spends a good amount of time on character development and work habits.

Once all this is understood, Taylor's seemingly obsessive goals become more understandable. He did have many important insights in making work efficient. When he began manufacturing was done in thousands of very small shops. It was horribly inefficient. His work did help our economy and helped the average worker become more productive. However, I still can't understand how someone could think having a human body physically haul 47 tons of pig iron per day is a good thing. There is a definite quality of life aspect that still wasn't grasped by these early efficiency experts.

Another extremely valuable topic the author clarifies is that Henry Ford's assembly line had more to do with meatpacking than Taylor's Scientific Management. Taylor's critics have unjustly used Henry Ford's manufacturing techniques as evidence against Taylor's methods when Ford himself made statements denying Taylor's influence. Also, like many original thinkers, Taylor was ill served by many who came after him and used his name but not his methods. This is all clearly laid out in this valuable book.

This isn't a whitewash or a book of simple praise. It paints a complex portrait of Taylor, but gives us enough context to understand him within his time. We get to know something of his character and that helps a great deal. It is a big book but reads short and is surprisingly engaging for a book on manufacturing. This book gave me insights into the early twentieth century that I needed to make certain pieces fall into place. It has a prominent place in my library and I hope a lot of people read it.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important Work, January 25, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Evanston, Wyoming) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency (Sloan Technology) (Hardcover)

I picked up this book because I wanted to have a better understanding of Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. I got it. Although at times Kanigel's sentence structure got a bit convoluted, particularly at the beginning, I found the book fascinating and useful to the end.

One of the major premises of the book is that we owe, or wish we did not owe, to Taylor the driving , amost relentless beat of our own age to be efficient, to use every spare moment. He revolutionized the world by combining elements that had existed for years into a coherent whole. We live with that legacy, for good or evil. As a manager and as someone concerned with organizations, I found the book not only good reading, but useful in thinking about my own work and how I view what I do. I highly recommend it!