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

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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.

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.

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!

I started my career as a manufacturing engineer and had often heard of Fred Taylor. Kanigel does a better job than most historians of making manufacturing history interesting. For me, there may have been a little more emphasis on Taylor's early life than I would normally be interested in, but Kanigel does an excellent job of defining Taylor. I had known that Taylor was famous for his time study techniques, what I didn't know was that he may have been partially or indirectly responsible for the advent and/or need for the human resources profession as well. He also had some involvement in cost accounting as it relates to calculating overhead rates for which I will be eternally disappointed in him for. He may have also been partially responsible for establishing the profession of manufacturing consultant as well. I am still enjoying the book and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the history of manufacturing.

I read this book after reading a review of it in Business Week. (it's the 1st I ordered off Amazon.com) I haven't much experience with biographies. I was surprised how entertaining and facinating I found "The One Best Way". I am an engineer involved in manufacturing automation and have always thought that we keep re-inventing concepts that have been long established. We are doing now with computers and software what Fred Winslow and his disciples did with stop watches! The title suggests how we think there SHOULD be one way, and one way only, to accomplish a task. As it turns out, it is (and was) a great theory that became dashed to pieces by good ol'e human nature. I recommend this to people who are interested in the history of engineering and manufacturing. Also anyone involved in Quality Systems and process design and management

This is another great book from Robert Kanigel, who also wrote Apprentice to Genius and The Man Who Knew Infinity, among other works. Kanigel puts a tremendous amount of research and heart into these projects, and The One Best Way is no exception. I'd never actually heard of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and perhaps few people have outside of business school, but Kanigel shows that this man is a very important figure not only in the business world, but in affecting society in general. Taylor, through making the workplace more efficient, wanted to improve the lives of workers, but he may in fact have done the opposite. There is a tremendous amount of historical detail in this book; it is not a concise summary of Taylor's life but rather a thorough history of it. But it doesn't bore and is definitely a pleasure to read. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

The context of everyday life is very important to understanding the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor, for in that time he began to change it radically. For this reason, Robert Kanigel's biography necessarily reads at times like a meditation on efficiency, on manufacturing, or simply on being a pioneer. The author is clearly up to the task. He also explains manufacturing and Taylor's studies, and the implications thereof, with great clarity and often with wit. This is one of the major strenghts of the work, for it allows Kanigel to communicate the importance of Taylor and Taylorism effectively to a general audience. Sometimes, though, he seems to get carried away -- as in the "Report from the End of the Century" that takes up 65 pages in the paperback edition.

The text shines, but one wishes for more coverage of his personal life. Kanigel seems content to begin with an extended view of Taylor's boyhood and nearer relatives. Then in adulthood he relegates any other issues to microscopic sketches, each spliced into one point in the narrative whether all their elements belong there or not. We are not given a sense of how these relationships developed over time. Such a treatment only contributes to the choppiness and lengthiness of the narrative. But these problems do not much harm the quality of the biography as a whole.

For anyone with an interest in the history of management theory, the early twentieth century, or what life was like without the extreme material abundance that marks our civilization (and how we came to be that way), this book is phenomenal. Kanigel deserves special praise for his even-handed treatment of the subject and of the many controversies that surround it. I got the sense that, through writing this book, he came to really appreciate Taylor and fully understand his critics.

I especially appreciated that he refrained from drawing conclusions about how to reconcile Taylor's ideas with later movements or from reinterpreting him through modern eyes. Instead, he leaves this all-important work to the reader.

Overall, the book is extremely well done. I highly recommend it.

Frederick Winslow Taylor virtually created some aspects of modern management. His influence was so powerful and so pervasive, that many things we now take for granted were concepts that he pioneered and if you hear about Taylor at all, it's usually with a strong negative judgpment.

Taylor, who did some of the very first efficiency studies, is vilified as the person who tried to turn people into machines. He's seen as the progenitor of the efficiency studies. The first of those assumptions is partially true, and the second is certainly true that needs to be set in context..

What author Robert Kanigal has done is clean up the facts and set Taylor in context.

He does this with an excellent history/biography. We learn that Taylor, who came from a wealthy background, also spent time working in machine shops. We find him learning as much from that process as from formal education; and claiming at times that the practical experience of working in a shop is necessary to understand industry - or at least industry as it was developing when he did his studies.

That time was the late 19th and early 20th Century. Even though the Industrial Revolution had been going on for awhile, factories were still developing into what we know them as today. Taylor showed how individual workers could be more efficient and effective. This was great for production, but not always popular with the workers he studied.

Taylor's studies gave rise to what was called "scientific management" and laid the groundwork for later "efficiency experts" like the Gilbreaths of "Cheaper by the Dozen" fame. His legacy is both positive and negative.

Part of his positive legacy is that Taylor demonstrated that you could actually study the way work was done and make improvements in the process. That's a powerful insight and like most powerful insights, it can be used for good or ill.

One of Taylor's famous studies, for example, tried to determine the most efficient way to shovel coal into steel mill furnaces. Taylor found that the mill could make great improvements in efficiency by changing things like the location of the pile of coal, the design of the shovel, and by allowing the shovellers to take periodic rest breaks.

Lots of folks who owned factories loved things like this. They got the shovels. The located the pile of coal where Taylor suggested. But they often left out things the didn't like, such as those periodic rest breaks.

What Taylor gave the world were powerful methods of analysis that can make factories and shops and offices more effective. In that sense, he would be the grandparent of techniques like operations research, statistical quality control and kaizen.

But, like the rest of us, Taylor was a product of his times, of his breeding, and of his experience. Like the rest of us, he had human flaws. The strength of this book is that it gives you a look at the whole picture.

You get to see just how remarkable Taylor's insights were, and how his life and experience shaped those insights. You get to see how others took what he had to say and used it both for good and for ill. And you get that all in a well-written biography that will hold your attention.

200 pages into the book and I was still wondering when he was going to tell us about
what Fred was really known for ( Efficiency theory).
Most of the book seems to be taken with excusing Frederick Winslow Taylor
for not understanding why there was a union movement
in an America of 12 hour days and child labor.
The Japanese think the fellow is just fine and have resurrected him as an Icon.
His downfall seems to have been cursing at a Congressman
in a Congressional hearing on labor practices.
People were dying in factories everywhere in America
during this era of overwork and under pay.
I don't think that "Sloan Technology" is going to be successful in
this hero resurrection. It is just sorry that a good biographer should
have taken this job. His Ramanujan book was really good.