Frederick Taylor Engineers Change for the Better Way 236.0

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 – 1915) is considered the father of scientific management and first management consultant.

He pioneered methods engineering and was the first to analyze work in detail and set them up as rational operations for efficiency.

His innovative methods made workers in the West and Japan much wealthier than workers under Soviet-style communism through 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall.

With the wealth created from his management methods, the Unions in the West, worker organizations formed as countervailing force to big business, bargained for their share of the resulting gains in efficiency and real productivity – a growing pie – and not a violent grab for a share of a shrinking pie.

Historical effects. These concepts destroyed the dogmatic dichotomy between Labor and Capital and, as noted by Peter Drucker, created the special class of knowledge workers who behaved like and wanted to get paid like owners, the Managers. Up to now, ideologues attack his methods as exploitative despite evidence to the contrary in America, Western Europe and Japan.

The productivity his methods created, a true innovation in its time context, allowed a negotiated sharing of results that was the main driver of the largest wealth creation in the history of mankind. The knowledge work of Management is now instituted even in social democracies to create wealth.

Ubiquity of Taylor’s techniques today as foundation knowledge. Taylor was a hands-on worker, who was a pioneer in the use of engineering to design and organize work in a process that was soon called Scientific Management.

Peter Drucker credited him as the pioneer scholar-worker who sowed the seeds for modern-day Management that Drucker himself codified through his classic book on General Motors,Concept of the Corporation, in 1949.

As a student of innovation, I see that knowledge is a vector value that accumulates and cannot, as the ideologues still do, be treated in isolation. Until today, Taylor’s contribution are so embedded in all aspects of management that people take his contribution for granted.

Taylor’s methods engineering, his contemporary Gilbreth’s time study techniques, and successor Gantt’s programming schemes became foundation knowledge for subsequent techniques.

Taylor and Japanese manufacturing and re-engineering. The process analysis techniques of Taylor are clearly visible in lean manufacturing that in turn has clear line through Toyota manufacturing system.

Re-engineering also uses his process mapping at the business end when they became these processes became the bigger cost component than manufacturing. In the US at that time, manufacturing costs was down to 30% and not anymore a rich field for cost reduction.

Gilbreth’s Therbligs and Methods-Time Measurement (MTM). With the advent of Just-in-Time and later on supply chain management (and to some extent Moore’s Law), some industries are now managed in terms of response time or event driven with fixed time.

The contribution of scientific management into the evolution of such time driven management approaches is also clear. The synthesis of time standards from elemental motions (of which I was trained in Taiwan in 1983) was an important stepping stone that was strongly opposed at the onset in the late 19th century. Today, it is an accepted fact that plans must have schedules.

Gantt’s Charting and PERT-CPM. The Gantt Chart evolved into such techniques like Program Evaluation and Review Technique – Critical Path Method (PERT-CPM) that is still popular civil engineering projects management.

Like Scheduling (and Budgeting), Programming, with its roots in Gantt, has become a formal part of any Strategy or Plan. Newer programming techniques like PERT and possibly linear programming (with its uses in developing programs under uncertainty and in optimization).

Indeed, Taylor’s contribution are everywhere in management including that common mantra that industrial engineers (IE) take with IE101: THERE IS ALWAYS A BETTER WAY!

Fatigue and ergonomics. Weak IEs are not able to communicate the assumptions of modern industrial engineering much more execute good change management.

Thus, quite often, IEs are accused of speeding up to attain efficiency instead of evolving such changes so that real productivity is achieved. Note that productivity is defined as a relationship between output and input often enabled by better methods, machines, and materials and the like.

When I obtained my IE degree in 1980, ergonomics, defined in Wikipedia as “science of designing the job, equipment, and workplace to fit the worker,” was already well defined. Likewise standards for work pacing, repetitive weights for lifting, illumination, noise limit standards for occupational health and safety likewise established.

Even the resulting fatigue from a day’s work has a standard. It should not be allowed to exceed the level that a normal night’s sleep can alleviate.

My IE education in 1980 had more of engineering including basic mechanical, electrical, civil and chemical engineering subjects and and less of management . We did have had operations research, cost and managerial accounting, and economics and project feasibility.

In conclusion: Standardization and Empowerment. Six sigma seems a totally modern phenomenon yet it must stand on Taylor’s shoulders to really work.

In my experience in manufacturing management in the early 1980s, I discovered that work methods, systems and procedures can only bring productivity up to the high nineties of its potential.

Employee empowerment, as espoused first at Intel in the 1990, is necessary to achieve the rest. Yet empowerment without standardization of work (Taylor’s legacy, i.e. documentation and controls) will only lead to chaos.

The world of work has gone a long way since Taylor’s time one hundred years ago. Technology-enabling will open new opportunities for efficient standardization and real time empowerment.

Remember, knowledge for innovation is cumulative and directional. Learning from Mr. Frederick W. Taylor and his successors in work design and management has a lot of ways to help us gain more wealth from real efficiency and productivity improvement.