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Frederick Winslow Taylor
(1856 - 1915) spent his life studying the workplace,
formulating landmark efficiency standards that are still
relevant in business today.
Motivated to create the ultimate, efficient
work environment, Frederick Winslow Taylor devised a system
he termed scientific management. While industrial
revolution-era innovators like
Samuel
Slater and
Francis
Lowell advanced quality control in the workplace,
Taylor formalized these principles and promoted them to
eager industrial managers striving to increase performance.
Taylor was born in 1856, to a wealthy, but
devout Quaker family in Germantown, Pennsylvania. Taylor
first learned to use time as a management tool while
attending Philips Exeter Academy. His mathematics
instructor, Bull Wentworth, would time how long it took for
half the students to complete a problem, developed a ratio
of his own ability to that of his average student, and then
created an examination that took exactly the time allotted
for class.
Taylor passed the entrance examination to
Harvard College but did not enroll, instead becoming
apprenticed to a machinist and patternmaker at the
Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia. After completing
an engineering degree at the Stevens Institute of Technology
in Hoboken, New Jersey, he went to work at the Midvale Steel
Company, where he began his studies of worker productivity.
Taylor believed in finding the right jobs for workers, and
then paying them well for the increased output. He advocated
paying the person and not the job and believed that
unions
would be unnecessary if workers were paid their individual
worth. Taylor doubled productivity at Midvale.
In 1890, Taylor became general manager of the
Manufacturing Investment Company and created the new
profession of management consultant. He served many
prominent firms, ending with the Bethlehem Steel
Corporation, where he implemented production planning, real
time analysis of daily output and costs, and a modern
accounting system. While at Bethlehem, Taylor and Mausel
White developed the Taylor-White system for heat-treating
chrome-tungsten tool steel, which won Taylor international
recognition.
Taylor retired at age 45 but still devoted
time and money to promote his principles of scientific
management. In 1906, Taylor was elected president of The
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Many of his
influential publications first appeared in the transactions
of that society. In 1909 he published the work for which he
is famous, The Principles of Scientific Management.
Considering himself a reformer, Taylor preached the ideals
and principles of his system of management until his death
from
influenza
in 1915. Today his system of industrial management continues
to influence the development of modern industry around the
globe. 
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Frederick Taylor
University, 346 Rheem Boulevard, Suite 203,
Moraga, CA 94556
Phone: (800) 988-4622, (925) 376-0900, Fax: (925) 376-0908,
Email:
admissions@ftu.edu |
