Page 138:

As a result, he would miss the one thing that was otherwise of

greatest use to him in his experience with men; that is the knowledge of the character of the men with whom he is dealing.

…

They then begin to learn the greatest lesson of life, that almost nine tenths of the work that every man has to do is monotonous, tiresome and uninteresting. They then start to develop the character which enables them to do unpleasant, disagreeable things.


Page 222:

One future disciple who later saw some of Taylor’s innovations up close, King Hathaway, reported that the practice of marking cuts on a forging set on a special surface plate - to reduce the time needed for machining itself - was, at Midvale, extended “far beyond [that] prevailing even in the best shops of that day.” Likewise, inspection methods, a visitor to Midvale wrote later, were made “As automatic as possible. The most careful thought was directed towards devising jigs, templates and gauges, so that the work of inspection should be reduced to a minimum.”


Page 282:

Taylor proposed - and at detroit, in 1895, this was a bold new idea - to throw the past aside and start afresh with a true, scientific reckoning of what constituted a fair day’s work. Management’s duty was to study, analyze, and improve each job; set new, higher levels of production; and help the men achieve them. This was not just another payment scheme, like Towne’s of Halsey’s; it was a whole new way of running shops and managing workmen. Rooted in science, it erected a new, higher wall between mind and muscle, planning and execution. To one scholar, Horace Drury, it depended on a management that was “Supposed to know more about the work than the men themselves - to know more than they know at present, and more than they can discover in the future.”


Page 344:

That son and grandson of American presidents, Henry Adams, came to Paris and saw in the fair’s almost silent, irresistibly turning dynamo a metaphor for the new age. French President Émile Loubet, borne across Paris by a golden carriage, could declare that “Soon, perhaps, we shall have completed an important stage in the slow evolution of work towards happiness, and of man towards humanity. It is under the auspices of such a hope that I declare the Exposition of 1900 open.”

It would never be like that again. The fair could have been conceived, Richard Mandell would write, only “during a time that sill had faith in optimistic philosophical systems, hopes for social reform, joy in expanding material wealth, and confidence in the moral benefits of art.” Here was almost the last historical moment when the idea of progress, fueled by science, on the march to human happiness, could still be taken seriously.


Page 354:

Much later, when the Taylor system was being considered for use in the navy, Archibald Johnston would concede that “many of the schemes proposed by Fred Taylor had a great deal of merit, [but he] personally did not seem to have the ability to carry them out in a reasonable time. This was due principally to the antagonistic methods used by him in handling men.” He fought with everyone.


Page 456:

But what was so un-American about having a stopwatch “used on you,” Edward Joyce was asked, or about working under a premium system? It drove you toward the big money, he answered, “and in the course of time [you] cannot stand it.” Joyce would go home, have supper, and find he “Was all tired out and would not feel like going anywhere, whereas while working by the day I feel as though there was something to live for, and feel like going out for a walk evenings.” There was more to life than money, he was saying. There was more to work than work.


Page 472:

Scientific management is not any efficiency device, not a device of any kind for securing efficiency; nor is it any group of efficiency devices. It is not a new system of figuring costs; it is not a new scheme of paying men; it is not a piecework system; it is not a bonus system; it is not a premium system; it is no scheme for paying men; it is not holding a stop watch on a man and writing things down about him; it is not time study; it is not motion study nor an analysis of the movements of men; it is not the printing and ruling and unloading of a ton or two of blanks on a set of men and saying, “Here’s your system; go use it.” Is is not divided foremanship or functional foremanship; it is not any of the devices which the average man calls to mind when scientific management is spoken of.

These were merely tools, “adjuncts.” Scientific management was more, demanding “a complete mental revolution” on the part of workers and management.

The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under scientific management is that both sides take their eyes off of the division of the surplus as the all-important matter, and together turn their attention toward increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided.

Pulling together, they hugely increase production and the resulting “surplus.” Wages and profits rise. Everyone goes home happy. “This, gentlemen, is the beginning of the great mental revolution,” which results in

the substitution of peace for war; the substitution of hearty brotherly cooperation for contention and strife; of both pulling hard in the same direction instead of pulling apart; of replacing suspicious watchfulness with mutual confidence; of becoming friends instead of enemies.

“Both sides must recognize as essential the substitution of exact scientific investigation and knowledge for the old individual judgement or opinion,” in all matters bearing on work. “This applies both as to the methods to be employed in doing the work and the time in which each job should be done.” Required was

the deliberative gathering in on the part fo those on the management’s side of all of the great mass of traditional knowledge, which in the past has been in the heads of the workmen, and in the physical skill and knack of the workmen, which he has acquired through years of experience.

It was this knowledge - recorded, tabulated, reduced “to laws, rules, and even to mathematical formulae” - that bestowed its bounty on worker, boss, and public.


Page 478:

“In my judgement, the best possible measure of the height in the scale of civilization to which any people has arisen is its productivity.” But if, as was true by 1912, the American worker was already more productive than his counterparts abroad, or his counterparts two hundred years before, yet still often lived in misery, why, asked Wilson, squeeze still more work out of him? And if higher production was supposed “to add to the comfort and well-being of mankind,” hadn’t Taylor, in pressing the worker to his limit and exacerbating his discomfort, “Thereby destroyed the very purposes of your production?”


Page 491:

Yukinori Hoshino, a Japanese bank director, was traveling in America in 1911 when the furor over scientific management broke. Taken with Principles of Scientific Management, he sought and received permission to translate it. It was published in Japan in 1913 to Taylor’s considerable pleasure. Soon, Japanese students, industrialists, and educators were making the pilgrimage to Boxly and touring Link-Belt and Tabor - one of them played on the Tabor baseball team - before returning to Japan with the received gospel. …

Before Pearl Harbor, a Japanese publication noted that virtually all scientific management literature published in the United States had appeared in Japan as well. Japanese popular magazines reported on the work of Taylor, Gilbreth, and the others. A fictionalized pamphlet, “The Secrets of Saving Lost Motion” sold more than a million copies. During the 1920s, Barth, Harrington Emerson, Hathaway, Wilfred Lewis, and Lilian Gilbreth all went to Japan to lecture, inspect factories, and otherwise help guide the embryonic movement.


Page 510:

His system, Taylor wrote a Harvard engineering professor not long before his death, “prevents arbitrary and tyrannical action on the part of the foremen and superintendents quite as much as it prevents ‘soldiering’ or loafing or inefficiency on the part of the workmen.” Since held management in the same benign embrace as it did workers. Indeed, workmen could hold their bosses to account and were even supplied printed forms on which to complain about them, which were “invariably” acted upon by management. “Thus you see we have under scientific management a greater democracy than has ever before existed in industry.”


Page 548:

In 1917, Horace Drury, a Columbia University professor, posed what seemed to him a crucial question facing scientific management, how it might draw out the ability of the worker. Children are “full of life, and enterprise, and the spirit of investigation.” But parents, school, custom, and lack of opportunity, crush it out of them, except, that is, for the “comparatively few” who enjoy “the benefits of real freedom, or leisure, travel, education, of responsibility, of authority.”

Drury’s vision? That “industry could find no greater opportunity, and life could have no greater end, than to extend and make universal” this richer kind of life.