The One Best Way:
Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency
By Robert Kanigel
Viking, 675 pages, $34.95
Work! The 20th Century fetish. Has any previous age been so obsessed with it, so troubled by it, or tried so desperately to find enough of it to go around? Have humans ever before struggled so hard to have more rather than less work to do?
Work sits squarely in the center of this century as the cultural focus and enduring political touchstone (JOBSJOBSJOBS). Some have even argued that work has emerged as something of a modern religion. The more we become a secular people, the more we expect our jobs to answer ultimate questions about meaning, purpose, personal identity and community.
Yet surprisingly little critical history is written about the origins of modern work. Perhaps this is because most of us hold onto work as one of the last reliable absolutes, a changeless given in the shifting sands of the late-20th Century.
Robert Kanigel’s “The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency” is a valuable antidote to this fantasy.
With this superb biography of the founder of scientific management, Kanigel begins to show that far from a changeless absolute, work is one of the newest of social inventions, altering its form and cultural substance in profound ways in the recent past, transformed by historical circumstance and powerful individuals such as Taylor.
Kanigel, award-winning author of “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” a biography of India’s turn-of-the-century math wizard, Srinivasa Aaiyangar Ramanujan, has given us another unlikely page-turner, a delightful biography of a man most of us remember but vaguely from dull school texts.
Those who hold the popular image of Taylor with his stopwatch timing the every move of a sweating, harassed worker, and of scientific management as a turn-of-the-century scheme to squeeze the last drop of effort out of employees before quitting time, will not be disappointed. Kanigel does not hide Taylor’s warts; his authoritarianism, his hucksterism, his casual approach to facts, his disregard for the human side of work–all are displayed. Kanigel fully describes labor’s initial disgust with Taylor’s scheme and the subsequent decline of his reputation.
But Kanigel’s book is nothing if not balanced (occasionally he goes too far giving both sides and ends up contradicting himself), and he thoroughly reviews Taylor’s real accomplishments, largely forgotten before Daniel Nelson published “Taylor and Scientific Management” in 1978.
Taylor was one of the key industrial engineers/managers of the early 20th Century, laying the foundation for the modern factory system and for what has mushroomed today into an industry/profession of its own, business management. Taylor helped wrest control of the workfloor from all-powerful and often-capricious foremen who operated by “rule of thumb,” and from skilled workers with irreplaceable expertise, giving control of work over to managers who found “scientifically” the “one best way” to do a job, and who used that knowledge to make industry efficient and competitive.
The carping of historians about “deskilling” and “speedups” notwithstanding, the time-and-motion studies, stopwatches and all had one saving purpose: increased productivity. And Taylor believed firmly that the efficiency resulting from his innovations was in the best interests of everybody–labor, management, owners and society.
Moreover, establishing “rational” work standards, breaking down complex skills into simple tasks that could be done quickly and easily, laying down pathways to get to the finished product soonest, selecting workers based on aptitude for the job, would, according to Taylor, eliminate once and for all friction between labor and management. Everyone would naturally accept the “one best way” because it was the objective truth, found out scientifically; it was sure better than being subject to the whim of a foreman. All would finally agree to “a fair day’s work for an fair day’s pay,” and industrial unrest would be forgotten.
Moreover, according to Taylor, science had demonstrated what common sense knew all along, that the reason people worked was for money. Pay a premium for more-productive effort and workers would follow the new rules and work faster, more would be produced, and everyone would benefit. The outdated, romantic notions about work’s being creative, providing some sort of community of brothers, etc., were pipe dreams, products of the overheated imaginations of people who had little contact with real workers.
This was scientific management’s rational, but revolutionary, message: Work exists to make products and services people need, not to act as some sort of eleemosynary academy for the improvement of workers’ personalities and souls. Giving up such romantic notions about work was a small price to pay for producing more and eliminating industrial unrest.
Taylor’s story has been told before, and very well indeed. Nelson’s book still stands as the standard biography. But Kanigel is not trying to outdo the academics–he has no footnotes. He wants to entertain and inform readers with a good story, set against a factory background, filled with fascinating machines and intricate technical designs.
The center of the book is certainly Taylor’s personal drama–his triumphs and humiliations, his struttings and self-doubts. Kanigel embellishes Taylor’s story with dozens of delightful tales about industrial efficiency and wonderful personalities: the famous greenhorn immigrant Schmidt (Henry Noll) being persuaded to tote and load incredible amounts of pig iron; Taylor and his wife, Louise, adopting Conrad Aiken’s brothers and sister after their father killed their mother and himself in 1901; Taylor confronting the special U.S. House committee set up in 1911 to investigate “Taylorism.”
Illustrating Taylor’s worldwide influence, Kanigel recalls the horrifying, riveting scene in “Schindler’s List” in which a Nazi officer puts his stopwatch on a prisoner at work, using the findings to order him to be shot.
My favorite tidbit is about Taylor’s work with high-speed tool steel. Anyone who loves a good how-the-hell-did-they-find-out-how-to-do-that story will relish Taylor’s experiments with tool steel that revolutionized the machine industries. Like something out of the old TV series “Industries for America,” the story unfolds from a seemingly impossible task to triumph. Taylor’s tool-steel story culminated at the international exposition in Paris in 1900, with huge crowds staring astonished as steel shavings, blue-hot from a lathe, curled off the work at incredible speeds.
But Kanigel’s focus on Taylor distorts his historical treatment of scientific and business management. Even though Kanigel cautions the reader that Taylor was a man of his times, the thrust of the book is Taylor-as-hero, as one of the two or three seminal figures of our age, ranking right up there with Darwin and Freud.
Several years ago Daniel Nelson cautioned that “Taylor and his writings have already received all the attention they deserve” and advised others to look at the “history of management practice (as) . . . thousands of individual decisions, most of which have nothing to do with Taylor.” One comes away from Kanigel’s book with little appreciation of the extent to which Taylor was representative of the revolution of factory and management at the turn of the century rather than the agent of change.
Still, Kanigel’s book is addressed to the non-academic who will care little for the historian’s reservations. Our lives and work will never be the same after that revolution still called Taylorism by so many. Labor’s initial cry of anguish that managers were carving the heart and soul out of work, reducing men and women to human machines, has echoed through this century, as has scientific management’s old response: Work is about making more with less and is not supposed to be fun.
We still struggle to “save work,” to stuff back the meaning and purpose, the joy and community that work must have contained before Taylor and his stopwatch came along. Much of this century has been spent trying to redeem work in the face of rational management and business principles that simplify, divide, mechanize, speed up, downsize and wash away our elaborate schemes to shore up “good jobs.”
Taylorism’s real legacy, or curse, is our enduring struggle to find meaningful work and rewarding jobs, a struggle that becomes ever more difficult and now begins to seem impossible with the approach of what Jeremy Rifkin is calling the Jobless Future.
Taylor and modern business management’s final, awful accomplishment may well be extremely productive but empty jobs, ripe targets for Dilbert’s comic-page barbs, and the disturbing challenge to find something worthwhile to do after work.
