Idea 38 - Scientific management
Is management
and art or a science? The debate is not new, nor is it over. In recent times,
the 'art' lobby has been making up some lost ground, but it was 19th-century
engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor who first cast management as a science. Peter
Drucker, the management guru's management guru, says Taylor deserves a place
alongside Darwin and Freud in the making of the modern world.
Taylor believed that production was subject to universal
laws that were independent of human judgment. It was the task of scientific
management to uncover these laws, to discover the 'one best way' of doing
things. It might be the best way of shoveling coal, of securing a bolt or of
ensuring quality control. Taylor is largely forgotten outside business schools
these days. When his memory surfaces, it's often for the worst of reasons. He
was the first to break work down into small pieces, measure them and put them
back together so they operated more efficiently. He was keen to eliminate
wasted effort and invented the time and motion study. In short, he was the
world's first efficiency expert, and is sometimes caricatured as the creator of
all that is worst about factory life. For some - trades unionists and Marxists
are prime examples - 'Taylorism' is still a dirty word that stands for an
exploitative, worker-as-automaton management style. In fact, Taylor believed
his methods would benefit workers too (and, to his credit, he did invent the
smoke break and the suggestions box).
It's striking how many theories of management are generated
these days by people who have never done a day's 'work' - making or selling
stuff -' in their lives. Modern management thinking is dominated by academics
and consultants rather than managers. But Taylor hatched his theories where he
meant them to apply, down on the factory floor.
Born into a well-to-do Quaker family in Pennsylvania, bad
eyesight forced Taylor to abandon hopes of an academic career, and he became an
apprentice patternmaker at a local steelworks instead. He studied mechanical
engineering at night and eventually became the company's chief engineer. Along
the way he invented several devices, modified a number of processes to make
them more efficient and published a paper that elevated metal-cutting into a
science.
Many and
varied finally, he turned his attention to the workers themselves.
It's probably hard to appreciate the full extent of his influence without
knowing what manufacturing was like before. In those days, work was mostly
carried out by skilled craftsmen who, like Taylor, had served apprenticeships.
Their techniques and work patterns were as many and varied as the men
themselves. Manufacturing was carried out in thousands of small shops and was,
by any standard, hopelessly inefficient. Managers, such as they were, had very
little contact with workers, who were managed by foremen. There was no love
lost between labor and management, who often regarded each other with
hostility.
Taylor could see all this, and he determined to apply the
methods of science to work, and the management of work, so as to improve
productivity. One of the things he had observed in the steel industry was the
way in which workers deliberately operated below their capacity. This was
generally known as 'soldiering'. Taylor believed that soldiering and low productivity
had various causes. Workers believed that if they worked harder, fewer of them
would be needed and some would lose their jobs. The system paid the same
regardless of how much each worker produced. Why work harder if you didn't have
to? And the workers' 'rule-of-thumb' methods, approaching each task in their
own individual way, resulted in much wasted effort.
Taylor began to experiment with ways of finding the optimum
performance level for certain jobs, becoming the original man with stopwatch
and clipboard. He would break a task down into its constituent elements, timing
each of them to within fractions of a second, and working out the
Most productive routines - 'screw on this bolt in 16.4
seconds'. He called his experiments 'time studies'. Importantly, he also
believed that wages should be based on performance.
Shoveling
Taylor's best-known experiment looked at shoveling. He determined that the
optimal weight for a worker to lift in a shovel- the weight that would keep him
working longest without tiring - was 21 ½ lb. Materials like coal and iron ore
have different densities, so the optimal shovel for each of them will be a
different size. The workers were issued with optimal shovels and, as predicted,
productivity shot up nearly fourfold. Pay went up accordingly - Taylor believed
in paying more for greater output. But the number of shovellers was reduced
from 500 to 140, so perhaps the workers were right to be suspicious.
Scientific method, he claimed, applied to 'the man at the
head of the business' just as much as to the workman. 'In the past the man has
been first; in the future the system must be first,' he wrote, with an Orwellian
lack of irony. The four objectives of scientific management were these:
Ø
To replace rule-of-thumb work methods with
scientifically devised methods;
Ø
To select, train and develop each worker, again scientifically,
instead of leaving them to train themselves;
Ø
To develop a spirit of cooperation between
workers and management, to
Ø
Make sure that the scientifically worked-out
methods are being followed;
Ø
To divide work between managers and workers in
almost equal shares, so that the managers plan the work scientifically and the
workers perform the tasks.
Taylor laid down principles of organization, which became
the forerunners of much subsequent organizational theory. They included clear
delineation of authority; separation of planning from operations; incentive schemes
for workers; and task specialization. Taylor's ideas were deployed in many
factories, where they duly raised productivity. Unscrupulous managers used them
to cut pay and, even in more sympathetic hands, they certainly increased the
monotony of work. He transformed the way work was done, however, and important
elements of scientific management survive to this day. Human resources and
quality control are only two of the corporate departments that have their roots
in what he did.
Reference: 50 Management Ideas You Really Need to Know
Book by Edward Russell-Walling
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