The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

by Robert Kanigel

A young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor chose a factory over Harvard,and his decision has made all the difference in the world as we know it today. Using what he'd learned as an apprentice in a machine shop, Taylor forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management--the source of our fierce, unholy obsession with "efficiency." According to management guru Peter Drucker, Taylorism is perhaps the "most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." Evoking a time when the industrial world was young, new, and exciting , Robert Kanigel illuminates the man whose ceaseless quest for "the one best way" changed the very texture and purpose of twentieth-century life.

Genres: Biography, History, Nonfiction, Business, Management, Economics, Social Science

704 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

Robert Kanigel was born in Brooklyn, but for most of his adult life has lived in Baltimore. He has written nine books.

"The Man Who Knew Infinity," his second book, was named a National Book Critics Circle finalist, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, and a New York Public Library "Book to Remember." It has been translated into Italian, German, Polish, Greek, Chinese, Thai, and many other languages, and has been made into a feature film, starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2015.

Kanigel's 2012 book, "On an Irish Island," set on a windswept island village off the coast of Ireland, was nurtured by a Guggenheim fellowship and later awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize by the American Conference for Irish Studies.

"Eyes on the Street," his biography of Jane Jacobs, the far-seeing author of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" and fearless champion of big-city life, was published by Knopf in 2016.

His most recent book, "Hearing Homer's Song: The Brief Life and Big Idea of Milman Parry," is a biography of the man who revolutionized our understanding of the Homeric epics. In support of this project Kanigel was awarded an NEH Public Scholar award.

Reviews

[aPriL does feral sometimes · Rating 5 out of 5]

'The One Best Way' is described as a biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, born in 1856, the guy who invented the job of the scientific 'efficiency expert.' The book is more than a biography; it is also a fascinating partial history of production in the United States. There is a point when the creation of stuff changed from being made by hand over many many days by a skilled artisan to being produced on machines by skilled machinists and later, unskilled laborers following instructions determined scientifically. I had no clue until I read this book how that occurred. The book describes through historical documents, interviews, letters, patent filings, newspaper and magazine articles, and speeches the progression and development of Taylor's ideas.

I have heard about this fellow and the men who followed in his footsteps most of my life, usually with the word "go**amn" in front of his title. To many workmen, the Efficiency Expert is the reason life in 19th-century machine shops got a lot faster and muscle-straining production became a 24-hour process. Whether you, gentle reader, hate him or love him, his experimentation and interest in improving the steps of production, whether it was working with fabric, wood or metal (clothes, houses, trains, etc.), America and Europe became the high-tech industrial giants we are today because of Efficiency Experts.

There is literally no current business untouched by Taylor's influence. Less known is Taylor's impact on accounting methods, but he also is one of the people responsible for how we measure how money is working and flowing through a business, and how labor is being compensated (for the record, I was one class short of getting an associates degree in accounting). Because of his wage compensation studies, he actually promoted higher pay for workmen because his studies showed it affected worker production negatively if workers were either underpaid or how much they were paid by 'piecework'. The dark use of his work is in the apportioning out of production steps required for a job. Efficiency experts time how long it takes a person to do a production step, for example to stoop over and pick up a box (they break down steps that fine). If it takes three seconds, then that is what is used to figure out how many boxes can be picked up. Next, swinging the box over to a table is timed, etc. They do not take into account back-strain or exhaustion of the laborer, thus strikes and unions were later invented. So, I wondered if Taylor and his followers had a clue about the nature of physical work. The answer is yes.

Even though he was an extremely wealthy prep-school son of an extremely wealthy father, he worked in a machine shop for several years as a teenager after dropping out of prep-school. While his initial interest was a fascination for machines, what he saw and heard in machine shops gave him the idea that workmen were not performing to the best of their ability for a variety of reasons. He also did not fit in exactly. However, workmen who were fit and intelligent became mentors and teachers. Taylor knew people got tired and he knew some men were stronger than others. His ideas to fix this was firing the weak and slow, and keeping the strong and fast, determined by scientific observation and measurements. Slacking off became considerably less defensible or secret, but at the same time, he recommended rewarding hard work with increased pay. He recommended that men of certain temperaments should be hired as well, who could tolerate mindless labor (he knew the work was mindless). At the same time, the changes made to job positions meant supervisors and bosses did not have to work so hard or keep so many responsibilities as they had (pay them less, fewer necessary to hire), and spread out the work to more lower-paid individuals (hire more and pay more, if necessary). But Taylor also thought paying men too much made them shiftless and lazy, so that was to be avoided. The bosses could more accurately measure what improved efficiency and lowered costs everywhere with his systemic studies in the factory or mill, and not only in labor management. If improving efficiency meant redesigning the factory, they could see where the layout logjams were and fix them.

What is a machine shop, and what did men do in them? There was no electricity, so the machines were powered by steam and belt. Originally, one man would work on a machine, with many responsibilities and steps per man, but eventually Taylor observed and broke down the steps using a stopwatch and describing each step. He would make multiple observations and measurements, and visit many different shops and interview thousands of men doing almost the same job.

(if some of these long videos are too long, I suggest watching the first five minutes or so to get the gist of it)

This is a machine shop:

http://youtu.be/9WXHNBMLZZM


This is an early machine shop sawmill:

http://youtu.be/8I1sgWKvIms


An old arsenal machine shop (at the time, some arsenal machine shops HATED Taylor):

http://youtu.be/dFN1yEvAhyc


Interior of a 1900 foundry:

http://youtu.be/CE-j7TEVX2U


Lathes were HUGELY important to machine shops:

http://youtu.be/lVgQ6khAI20

http://youtu.be/o4Ok0LQx0Uc

http://youtu.be/Q0nOVzWGdnM


For those of you who are lathe fans, a really old lathe:

http://youtu.be/65sWv212kqo


Taylor studies also improved 'high speed steel cutting tools', made from stronger steel for the lathe (his experiments determined the proper tool made of the proper material - if wood or metal, what the proper speed should be to power a lathe to make something - all of which is important because of heat - unwanted fires - and of course, shortening the time needed to trim, cut, shape, or drill your material (sometimes slow was better than fast, depending on the tool needed on what material being worked), plus the using up of parts which needed to be replaced, especially belts:


http://youtu.be/cjDd8EqZI4c

http://youtu.be/61R8NLyk_gM

http://youtu.be/LKGkkGFsF50


Taylor did lots and lots of experiments making steel from iron (iron is cooked to remove carbon, which is how steel is produced, basically, but how hot, how long to cook, and what additives are needed was unknown during Taylor's time, so the quality of steel was uneven:

http://youtu.be/B9okBTLJVKc


He improved paper mills, too, but I couldn't find an old paper mill processing video, so below is a link to modern paper making (nothing to do with Taylor):

http://youtu.be/E4C3X26dxbM


The funny thing is while Taylor's philosophy and methods took over Industry, many individual industrialists fired him and rejected him. Everywhere he worked, he pissed people off and caused walkouts. He was much more successful when he gave lectures and speeches. As you can imagine, he ran his family under the same principles. He had adopted children, and the boys seemed to thrive under scientific management. The daughter, however, had mental problems....

One of Taylor's disciples was Frank Gilbreth, made famous by the memoir 'Cheaper by the Dozen'. Gilbreth took Taylor's idea of timed scientific management in a new direction - motion studies - to eliminate nonessential motions.

One of the ironies of the Taylor story is that his methods were not generally known except in Industrial circles and industry magazines. Were it not for a 'for-the-people' liberal judge, Louis Brandeis, who was struggling with the demands of powerful railroads asking for a rate increase, Taylor may have remained obscure to the general public. When Brandeis asked the railroad magnates about their costs, they replied they didn't know and had no way to know except by instinct. In asking for advice from his friends (he did not want to allow the railroads to raise rates), he was told about Taylor. Brandeis asked Taylor to testify about his cost measurement systems. Instantly Taylor was the subject of every general magazine and newspaper in the country.

A few years later after these ideas became part of the accepted canon of American manufacturing, Henry Ford developed and popularized the assembly line. Taylorism also spread to the garment trades, the mines, the railroads, the hospitals, the clerical workers, and prisons. It was instituted in public administration and taught in colleges. Bookbinding, canning, lumber, publishing and thousands of other industries were all examined by Taylor enthusiasts. Japan fell totally in love with Taylor methods. When Europe, after WWI, saw the production levels of American industry, France, the Netherlands, England, Italy, the Soviet Union, but in particular Germany, rushed to study Taylor's scientific measurement policies. Today, our stores are loaded with goods and labor-saving devices cheaply mass-produced and sold for a few dollars, all of which is clearly an improvement over what was available to the typical worker of 1900. What only the rich could have in 1900, the lower-classes of the First World nations today own. Of course, the rich got richer and almost never do the hard labor of the lower-classes. Lower-classes still die younger and sicker and make do with far less than the rich. It was shown that many of Taylor's measurement systems were based on men with unusual strengths and speeds, unusually athletic and powerful. They were not average, but freakish. Also, no attention was paid to a man's other life away from the factory floor - family, house, resting, education, fun - it was of no account to the masters of industry if a man could barely could walk home, eat his dinner while soaked in sweat, too numb with exhaustion to help his children or his wife. It was, and is, clear that working at one's own pace means low wages and low production.

Personally, I'm grateful for the development of unions and laws which helped us find a middle path, to some degree, where high production doesn't kill off the labor force. Loss of autonomy has not meant a loss of creativity, generally, since either protective laws or employer enlightenment allows for job improvement suggestions from workers who do have time to rest and think. Mostly.

Taylor is no longer mentioned much, although his methods - "...fixed tasks, strict orders, tight control..." (page 547) are still both demonized and praised. Taylor, who was always rich, was born when people did not change their social class, and he believed it impossible for poor people to be autonomous (he believed they were born to be obedient due to their surroundings, which would never change). What do you think?

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting and rewarding sojourn into an arena of human experience of which I had little to no knowledge of. I might have gone 5-stars but it was slow in places and probably could have stood some editing and a few diagrams would have helped immensely. If asked who Frederick Winslow Taylor was, I would surely have 'drawn a blank'. Turns out he was the driving force (inventor might be the wrong term) of the discipline of 'scientific management' (which I also had not heard of). To make a long story very short, he may have been the first guy to use a stopwatch to time workers in their daily tasks (so-called 'time-studies'), somewhere in the early 1880s at the Midvale Steel Works in Philadelphia. This small beginning led to a revolution in the work place that continues to this day. Whether that was a good or bad thing is debated at some length in the pages of this thorough biography. It seemed almost too thorough at times with a long descriptions of his childhood family travels in Europe. But it is all to a purpose in bringing out a man, a period and place that would give rise to what was eventually called 'Taylorism'. There is so much here in the superbly researched work; literary references, the Depression of 1873, methods of steel-making and cutting, early trials at other industrial sites, fierce debates on the nature and purpose of work, and the role of science in society. The latter is particularly apropos of today as the tendency to worship science seems to be a recurring and increasing theme of our time. The imprimatur of 'science' was used back in the Taylor era to justify all sorts of conclusions about the nature of work. On page 473 he quotes Taylor: 'This gentlemen is the beginning of the great mental revolution' which results in a sort of worker and social utopia (always beware of people promising that!). This mental revolution required a radical change in viewpoint, one 'absolutely essential to the existence of scientific management'--the sovereignty of science. 'Both sides must recognize as essential the substitution of exact scientific investigation and knowledge for the old individual judgement or opinion', in all matters bearing on work. Bow down and pay obeisance to Science! Since most of us 'work' at something, it may make you rethink your own work or anything you've ever done.

[Marks54 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the father of "scientific management" and perhaps the best known founder of modern management theory. It is easy to stereotype Taylor, whose reputation has suffered at the hands of subsequent gurus ranging from human relations theorists to Marxists who criticize "Taylorism" and "Fordism".

Kanigel's book is very well done and is good at locating Taylor as an articulate engineer who stumbled onto the business scene when large companies were scaling up to large volume factory work and Taylor had some useful ideas to sell. The book also brings out that Taylor was known for his technical prowess as well and was influential for his innovations in welding as well as management.

Taylor was really one of the first influential management consultants and the criticisms one might have for Taylor are very similar to those for management and strategic consultants in general, adjusted for the current fashions and fads of the time.

If you are not interested in how big firms got bigger and more powerful, this is probably not your cup of tea. If you are interested, this is a good critical bio about a frequently very misunderstood person who changed how business was done.

[Steve Horton · Rating 5 out of 5]

"In the past man has been first. In the future the System will be first." The theme of a dystopian science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick or Isaac Asimov? Not even! This is a quote from Frederick Winslow Taylor, the subject of this outstanding biography of one of the unrecognized founders of our modern age. F W Taylor created the "one best way" paradigm, where he sliced jobs into components, engineered the pieces for maximum efficiency, then reconstituted them into a superior, more efficient version of the original. "Taylorism" became the bane of labor at the same time it was embraced by management.

For those of you interested in megatrends and finding wellsprings in history, this book provides in abundance. Taylor's philosophy, emphasis on efficiency, and insistence upon a "Christian work ethic" influences many spheres of daily life even today. For those who want to understand today's business management philosophy, start at the beginning.

[Ethan]

aaa, amazing, sharp writing, incredible stories, combines technical and historical/general interest, lots of connections to other good books

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency by Robert Kanigel was an interesting read. It is a biography of Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s life and how he came up with a new form of management that significantly contributed to modern management theory. It was a very long read at about 600 pages but contained a wealth of information in regards to Taylor himself, “Taylorism”, and its effects on the workplace long after he has passed.

Taylor, who chose factory work over Harvard, embraced the idea that things could be improved by looking at it like a machine. He broke jobs down into smaller chunks, components, or aspects and found ways to make them efficient through engineering methods, stitched them back together, and repeated this into his system. The quote “In the past man has been first. In the future the System will be first.” is taken to the furthest ends of what it means. In this system, jobs are treated more like cogs in a machine, almost literally; doing as much as possible with as few people as possible with little to no autonomy. This is a true sign of Taylor's background in factory work. Kanigel is against “Taylorism”, and somewhat biased against Taylor as well, however, I do not believe that it is demeriting.

There is so much more in this book, that I could probably go on for a while on the interesting small things and things that interconnect, however, the book could probably explain it better. If you enjoy long biographies and books with information about how things work today, I would recommend this book. However, I will say that it is not very easy to just read this book, it often feels slow and drags at certain parts. If it wasn’t for my enjoyment of understanding new concepts, I probably would strongly dislike this book.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Taylor was an important guy. Modern management is lousy with his concepts, now twice translated - exported into Japan in the early 1900s and imported back to the western world since the 1980s. The concepts have remained unchanged. Scientific management. Efficiency above all. Time studies. Standardisation. Centralisation. Large back office supporting as few workers as possible. And absolutely stripping all agency and autonomy from the worker. All this was gifted to us by Taylor and his disciples in the early 20th century. All dissenting voices were squashed with the onset of the two world wars when driving the Warmachine at any cost became an obligation for all.

Thing is, without Taylor, Taylorism would have still existed under a different name. Assign profit as the most important measure of success and people will find a way to make profit at any human cost. Taylorism is the link between communism and capitalism, responsible for the rise of corporatism and the Godzilla-sized management industry we see today. Taylor's pseudo-scientism has seemingly infected every career, industry, and profession. Even managers are now managed by the same quantitative measures as the workers. Taylorism is ubiquitous. As Taylor said, "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first." And so it is.

This book is great though Kanigel is fairly biased against Taylor (not a problem for me) and confusingly jumps back and forth in time during the last few years of Taylor's life.

[Mehmet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am about two-thirds through. I should say I didn't read in order. I picked up and read pieces that were more relevant to my coursework. But I would say it is a thoroughly researched and well-written book on the times, life and work of Frederick Taylor, probably the most misunderstood and vilified business thinker of all times, and his impact worldwide. As the author says, we still live in his world. I believe that to still be the case even though the book was published more than 20 years ago. A must-read for anyone wishing to understand 20th century management and business practices as they relate to employees and efficiency. It is a fun read, not dry at all. The people come to life as it were.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just finished The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency. If you've ever wondered where piece rate work, timed studies and the 'McDonaldization' of work practices came from, this is the book. It's a long read and that's my only quibble. It could easily have been condensed by a 1/3. There is too much rehashing of events such as Taylor's boyhood experiences in Europe and sometimes the author backtracks one too many times. Apart from the length, it's a great book to get into Taylor's mindset and how much his influence still resonates today, amazingly. Whether you are pro or con in regards to Taylorism, you'll learn much from this book.

[Dale · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting. Very detailed book and a tough read.

[Caryatid · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a lot of pages which to my mind is a good thing but unfortunately for a biography it's a great machinists book and for a machinists book it's a great biography.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Kanigel provided a thorough story of the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor and the founding of scientific management.

[Jennifer]

Much more detailed than what I was looking for.

[Alexandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has anyone checked in on Nolle recently? He doing okay? Rip a legend