The Principles of Scientific Management

Picture a forest being cut down, or topsoil washing out to sea. You can see that loss, photograph it, get angry about it.

Now picture a man at a workbench making the same clumsy, wasted movement over and over, all day. Taylor's introduction starts exactly here: the ill-directed movements of men "leave nothing visible or tangible behind them." Noticing that loss "calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination," so nobody holds meetings about it.

He was sure this was the larger, invisible waste, greater every day than the vanishing forests and coal. The whole book is an attempt to make it visible. And the first thing he has to settle is who would actually gain if it stopped.

Chapter I opens with the sentence the rest of the book hangs on: "The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee."

Look at the word "coupled." Not profit first and wages if anything is left over. Not a fair split of a fixed pie. The two are coupled, not traded off: they rise together or not at all.

Taylor admits this sounds so obvious that stating it should be unnecessary. Then he points out that almost nobody running a factory, or working in one, behaves as if it were true. The gap between that obvious sentence and the real shop floor is where scientific management begins.

Taylor also refuses to let "prosperity" mean the obvious thing.

For the company, he says, it means not only large dividends but "the development of every branch of the business to its highest state of excellence, so that the prosperity may be permanent." A season of fat profits bought by running down the plant, the product or the people does not count.

That changes what a good owner is trying to do. A boss who wrings everything out of his men for one big year and then loses them has not reached maximum prosperity in Taylor's sense. He has only had a good year, not a lasting business, and the lasting business is the goal.

For the workman the definition is broader still. Maximum prosperity means "not only higher wages than are usually received by men of his class," but, "of more importance still," the development of each man to his state of maximum efficiency.

In plain terms: being trained up to the highest grade of work his natural abilities fit him for, and then, when possible, actually being given that work to do.

So a man who earns decently while stuck forever below his ability is not, by Taylor's measure, as prosperous as he could be. Pay is one half of it. The other half is growing into better work, and Taylor ranks that half higher.

By Taylor's own definition, what does "maximum prosperity" mean for an employee?

• Shorter hours and lighter tasks for the same wage as before
• Higher wages, plus being developed for and given his highest grade of work✓Correct answer
• The highest daily wage his employer can afford to pay that year
• A fixed share of the company's dividends, paid on top of his wages

Taylor says higher wages matter, but developing each man to the highest grade of work he is fit for is "of more importance still." Pay alone, however high, is only half of his definition.

If the goal is so obvious, why spell it out? Because, Taylor writes, a large part of the organization of employers and employees alike "is for war rather than for peace."

Most men on both sides believe their interests are necessarily antagonistic. Every dollar that goes to wages is a dollar out of profit; every extra hour of effort is a gift to the boss. So each side organizes to win the fight.

Scientific management, he says, stands on the opposite conviction: that the true interests of the two "are one and the same." The employer's prosperity cannot last through a long term of years unless the employee's comes with it, and the other way round.