Frederick Taylor – Management Guru. Part 1.
Watch on KineScope.
Frederick Taylor – Welcome to the Machine
In his film of 1936, Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin shows business life as a kind of bad dream. The film is set in a huge factory where people are simply parts of a machine. The workers are not allowed to talk and they are not expected to think. Their jobs are boring and their lives are ruled by the clock. Every action is measured by managers in white coats. Above them all, there is the figure of the boss. He’s the man who owns everything, controls everything and sees everything. He even gives orders to workers while they’re in the company’s washrooms!
According to Chaplin, this was the terrible world that had been created by the ideas of Frederick Taylor. Today, Taylor is remembered as the father of scientific management. He has almost certainly had a bigger effect on business than any other thinker. His methods were copied by businessmen like Henry Ford in the USA and political leaders like Lenin in Russia. Even now, many companies are still managed according to his ideas.
But there has always been one big problem with Frederick Taylor and his ideas. He never really understood people. In his business life, he was never a very successful manager because he was always arguing with his workers. In his private life he often behaved in a very strange way.
In fact, in his later years, he met one of his old bosses, Charles Harrah, at the entrance to a hotel.
‘How are you?’ asked Taylor.
‘Oh, very well,’ said Harrah, ‘I’m making millions and millions of dollars. In fact, I’m planning to build a hospital for mad people.’
‘Oh really?’ said Taylor.
‘Yes, really,’ said Harrah, ‘and I’m saving a whole floor of it for you.’
Frederick Taylor never intended to go into management. His family was one of the richest in Philadelphia and his parents had great hopes for him. The Taylors lived in a large house with servants. They took expensive holidays in Europe and by the age of sixteen, young Fred had learnt both French and German. It seemed he was certain to live the life of a rich gentleman.
At school, Fred was an excellent student and a fine sportsman, who loved tennis. When the USA’s top university, Harvard, accepted him as a law student, it seemed that his future was decided. But Frederick Taylor had one big problem; he always tried too hard at everything. To pass Harvard’s entrance examination, he had studied night and day and had read too many books. Soon after Harvard accepted him, he found that he had a serious problem with his eyes.
He was very worried and said to his parents, ‘If I have problems with my eyes now, what will they be like after several more years of hard study?’
His parents tried to make him feel better.
‘They’ll get better, Fred,’ they told him. ‘You just need some rest.’
But rest was something that Taylor never wanted. He didn’t wait for his eyes to improve; instead, he changed the direction of his life completely. His parents were shocked when he told them about his plans.
‘How can you do this,’ they asked him, ‘after the education that you’ve had?’
But Taylor knew what he wanted.
‘I’ve decided to take a job as an ordinary worker in one of our local factories.’
Taylor had always hated working with his hands, but for the next four years, he learnt to cut metal and to operate machines. His colleagues were rough men from the poor parts of Pittsburgh. They were surprised to find this young gentleman in their factory and wondered why he was there. Taylor was clearly very different from them. He was a religious young man and he didn’t like the way they drank alcohol or smoked tobacco. But his colleagues were friendly to Taylor and he was soon surprising other members of his family with the bad language that he had learnt at his workplace.
But Taylor was not a great success at the factory, and when his training was finished, his boss told him that there was no future for him there. At the age of twenty-two, Taylor found that he was unemployed. What could he do? He didn’t want to ask for help from his rich friends and he didn’t want to use his family money to make a new start. Instead, once again, he chose the most difficult direction. He took a job as an ordinary worker at another Pittsburgh factory – the Midvale Steel Works.