The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

This is another great book from Robert Kanigel, who also wrote Apprentice to Genius and The Man Who Knew Infinity, among other works. Kanigel puts a tremendous amount of research and heart into these projects, and The One Best Way is no exception. I'd never actually heard of Frederick Winslow Taylor, and perhaps few people have outside of business school, but Kanigel shows that this man is a very important figure not only in the business world, but in affecting society in general. Taylor, through making the workplace more efficient, wanted to improve the lives of workers, but he may in fact have done the opposite. There is a tremendous amount of historical detail in this book; it is not a concise summary of Taylor's life but rather a thorough history of it. But it doesn't bore and is definitely a pleasure to read. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.

Kanigel illuminates the life and times of both Fred Taylor and the revolution his ideas spawned. Without explicitly understanding how Taylor's ideas have shaped our lives we cannot understand the profound impact this 19th Centruy man continues having on our day-to-day lives. With the often misplaced notion of efficiency so deeply ingrained in the very fabric of our lives, we often ignore the profound impacts of blind quests for efficiency.Who do you know who can reliably recognize the tipping point where efficiency destroys effectiveness (and with it competitiveness)? Who do you know who would challenge changes in the name of efficiency because the changes would impair quality, effectiveness, morale, or labor relations? Without understanding Fred Taylor and efficiency, how can you avoid mistaken applications of the notion? What will keep a 19th Century man from being the most influential man of both the 20th Century and the 21st Century?

This is a wonderful book. You shouldn't reject this book based upon your opinion of its subject. The books is written very well and evokes enough of the times in which Taylor lived to give us a more nuanced portrait of the man within the context of his world.Nowadays, F.W. Taylor is often portrayed as either a villain who has all but enslaved us or he is defended as not really meaning what he said. Instead, this book shows us Taylor's nineteenth century upper middle-class background and spends a good amount of time on character development and work habits. Once all this is understood, Taylor's seemingly obsessive goals become more understandable. He did have many important insights in making work efficient. When he began manufacturing was done in thousands of very small shops. It was horribly inefficient. His work did help our economy and helped the average worker become more productive. However, I still can't understand how someone could think having a human body physically haul 47 tons of pig iron per day is a good thing. There is a definite quality of life aspect that still wasn't grasped by these early efficiency experts.Another extremely valuable topic the author clarifies is that Henry Ford's assembly line had more to do with meatpacking than Taylor's Scientific Management. Taylor's critics have unjustly used Henry Ford's manufacturing techniques as evidence against Taylor's methods when Ford himself made statements denying Taylor's influence. Also, like many original thinkers, Taylor was ill served by many who came after him and used his name but not his methods. This is all clearly laid out in this valuable book.This isn't a whitewash or a book of simple praise. It paints a complex portrait of Taylor, but gives us enough context to understand him within his time. We get to know something of his character and that helps a great deal. It is a big book but reads short and is surprisingly engaging for a book on manufacturing. This book gave me insights into the early twentieth century that I needed to make certain pieces fall into place. It has a prominent place in my library and I hope a lot of people read it.

For anyone who has worked - on an assembly line, as a bureaucrat-in-a-box - the greatest workplace nemesis is a nonexistent ideal: the theoretical person against whom your "efficiency" is measured. Often, not even a boss or office rival is as irritating as this cold standard, the product of stopwatch-wielding efficiency experts and industrial psychologists who claim to have a scientific measure of "average output." In The One Best Way, science writer Robert Kanigel examines the first so-called efficiency expert of them all: Frederick Taylor, the turn-of-the-century engineer and pioneering management consultant.Taylor's idea was simple: break down all jobs into their smallest component tasks, experiment to determine the best way to accomplish them and how fast they can be performed, and then find the right workers to do them. It was called scientific management, or "Taylorism" -- a formula to maximize the productivity of industrial workers. "The coming of Taylorism," Kanigel writes, took "currents of thought drifting through his own time -- standards, order, production, regularity, efficiency -- and codif[ied] them into a system that defines our age."Though he had an enormous impact on our everyday lives, today Taylor is little known outside management circles. This is curious: in his own time, Taylor was a world-class celebrity, advocating an organizational revolution that would link harder work to higher wages -- as well as instituting shorter working hours and regular "cigarette breaks." His books and articles were translated into all the major languages and passionately studied, even in the Soviet Union, as guides to a future industrial utopia; he was, in many ways, Stalin's prophet. Yet Taylor was also reviled as a slave driver who devalued skilled labor and despised the common worker, and he was ridiculed as a failure in many of his business undertakings.Much of Kanigel's book is devoted to descriptions of the shops that Taylor worked in: a ball-bearing factory, a paper mill, and machine-tool plants, to name a few. It's dramatic how different the world he describes is from the work environment of today. Here were no highly educated managers attempting to exercise minute control over relatively unskilled employees. Instead, craftsmen dominated these oily pits -- spinning steel-cutting lathes, constructing elaborate sand molds for machine tools, and maintaining the gigantic leather belts that harnessed the energy of central steam engines. THis was in many ways the most fascinating part of the book for me: I learned what people did in the decaying mills that surrounded my New England home.To all but the most practiced eye, such a workplace was a chaotic scene. What the craftsmen did -- and what they were capable of -- was largely a mystery to management, which deprived the managers of control and power, leading to a number of stunningly counterproductive practices. If tool and die makers produced jigs beyond a certain threshold, for example,

I picked up this book because I wanted to have a better understanding of Frederick Taylor and Scientific Management. I got it. Although at times Kanigel's sentence structure got a bit convoluted, particularly at the beginning, I found the book fascinating and useful to the end. One of the major premises of the book is that we owe, or wish we did not owe, to Taylor the driving , amost relentless beat of our own age to be efficient, to use every spare moment. He revolutionized the world by combining elements that had existed for years into a coherent whole. We live with that legacy, for good or evil. As a manager and as someone concerned with organizations, I found the book not only good reading, but useful in thinking about my own work and how I view what I do. I highly recommend it!