Frederick Taylor – Management Guru. Part 5.
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Taylor had had enough of business. But at least he had shown that his idea of scientific management could work. He went back to his house in the country and wrote pieces for magazines and newspapers that explained his ideas. He travelled round the country and gave talks to groups of businessmen and engineers. Slowly, more and more people became interested in the idea of scientific management.
Then, in 1910, Taylor suddenly became famous. The US government was having a meeting about the different costs of train and sea travel. The railway companies said they needed more money from taxes. The shipowners said that they didn’t. To support their argument, the shipowners explained that the railway companies wouldn’t need the money if they improved their management. To explain their point they asked some managers to talk about a man called Frederick Taylor and a new idea called scientific management.
‘If the railways introduce this idea,’ one manager told the US government, ‘they will save a million dollars a day.’
Another manager said that scientific management could cut costs and increase workers’ pay by 100 per cent.
The next day, Taylor’s name and a description of his ideas were in all the newspapers. Everybody in the US business world was talking about scientific management.
In fact, the time was just right for Taylor’s ideas. In the early 1900s in Detroit, another engineer, called Henry Ford, had started a new business that made cars. At that time, cars were very expensive and were only owned by the richest people in the world. But Ford believed that it was possible to sell cars at a price that ordinary people could afford. He simply needed to reduce the cost of making them. To do this, he decided to make just one kind of car in just one colour – the famous black Model T Ford. At his factory, he also started making Model Ts in a new way. His method was to move the car along a line while workers added pieces to it. The workers’ jobs were very boring, because they just did the same thing again and again and again, all day long. But Ford wasn’t worried about that, for him workers were just another part of the machine. He once said, ‘When I want a pair of hands, why do I get a human being as well?’
The Ford Motor Company was very successful. Its factory in Detroit produced a new car every forty seconds, and the price of a new Ford car soon fell below $300. As a result, millions of people bought Ford cars and Henry Ford became the richest man in the world.
Of course, everybody wanted to know the secrets of his success. When they heard about Frederick Taylor, many believed that he could give them the answers they wanted. The ideas of Ford and Taylor were very similar. Both Ford and Taylor believed that workers didn’t want or need to have responsibility. Without their managers, workers were nothing. It was the manager’s job to find the best workers and to teach them to work in the best possible way. It didn’t matter if the workers were unhappy. They were paid an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work and it was their job simply to obey.
These were the ideas that Taylor wrote about in his book of 1911, The Principles of Scientific Management. It was a huge success. When he gave a talk in New York City some time later, it was attended by 69,000 people!
Managers who followed Taylor’s ideas were famous for their watches. They all wanted people to work as quickly as possible, so they needed their watches to measure the workers’ speed. Taylor, too, loved watches and carried an expensive Swiss one with him wherever he went. In 1917, when he was taken into hospital because of an illness, the doctors and nurses soon noticed that Taylor always wound his watch at exactly the same time every day. Then early one morning, a nurse heard a sound from Taylor’s room at four o’clock in the morning.
‘How strange,’ she thought. ‘Mr Taylor usually has such regular habits. Why is he winding his watch so early in the day?’
In fact, it was Taylor’s last action. When the nurse looked into the room just an hour later, she found that Taylor was dead. In a way it seemed right that this was the final action of the man who had made so many others servants of the clock.
In the years after his death, the ideas of Frederick Taylor spread around the world. His books were translated into many different languages. Factories from California to Siberia were organized according to his methods. Machines came first and people came second. Managers learnt to control and workers were taught to obey. The boss’s word was law.
But today, many people question Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. Does it really produce the best results? Do managers always know best? Is it true that people only work for money? Is it true that they don’t want responsibility?
But although his ideas are often questioned, it’s certain that there are many businesses in the world today that still haven’t forgotten the lessons of Frederick Taylor.
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