Do You Know About Frederick Winslow Taylor?

Mark Mirtchouk
I pledge my honor that I have abided by the Stevens Honor System

To my shame I have first learned about Frederick Winslow Taylor only in September of 2015 in my Computers and Society class. After attending the Taylor's World Conference, I have learned so much about this outstanding man! First and foremost, he was one of the most influential people in the field of management. He wrote a book “The Principles of Scientific Management” and his ideas are still valid today.  Back in his time in 1870s, there was no good method for managing workers and he revolutionized the field.

Simon Head, the person leading the conference thought that “if we look at the figures whose ideas and practices have shaped the modern world, we think of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein, we should add Taylor to this list.” This finding really caught my attention. Who was this Frederick Winslow Taylor that I have truthfully never heard of before last Thursday?

Taylor was a very well-rounded individual.  Aside from his interest in Project Management, he was an inventor with 42 patents, won the equivalent to US Open doubles in tennis, also won 4^th place in the Olympics for golf. He is mostly famous for helping out Gantt who made the Gantt chart that explained the project schedule. He was the founder of the system that made workers in Japan increase their production tenfold. He was fascinated with increasing work efficiency and conducted numerous experiments in various companies to figure out the ideal performance. He was trying to determine the most efficient way to do various job.  He strongly believed that jobs should be given to workers in accordance to their skill and motivation and their progress has to be monitored. Also Taylor suggested that there always should be a dialogue between management and workers to achieve best performance.

At first people in America didn’t believe in his methods, but the people in Japan used them a lot and succeeded. He was focused on the de-skilling of people and de-skilling a hard process into an easier one.  Taylor supposed that if management makes anyone do a task multiple times, eventually the worker will become good at it.  Therefore, management can pay current employees less because there will be more people who wanted the job. Simon Head gave an example of current day retail giants like Amazon and Walmart where the management would time their employees with a stopwatch creating a lot of stress. Eventually everyone got worn out because the stress was too great, but then the management would just hire new workers to replace the ones that were not performing well. Using Taylor’s methods, Xerox wanted to implement help desk call centers where the person having a problem with any Xerox product would talk to a call center specialist. Those “specialists” would listen to the complaint and look up the problem using keywords in their computer database with the most common causes of failure. This method did not work so well. Later in the talk Simon Head communicated how the average German car manufacture has to pay their labor double what the pay in the US because the US used de-skilling and exporting jobs to Mexico while the German cars are so complex that they only highly qualified workers can perform the tasks.

In conclusion I would like to point out that although Taylor had interesting ideas about studying a workplace, we have to take his ideas with a grain of salt.