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Rating: 
Summary: 600 pages on a guy who had one good idea
Review: 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, 19th-century foremen would dock (!) their pay per item -- an obvious incentive for them to slow down. And because ball-bearing inspectors in a Fitchburg mill worked slowly and talked too much, they were forced to put in 101/2 -hour days, without breaks. Taylor witnessed such practices and decided to change them. In one of his most famous experiments, on "Schmidt", he got a common laborer to double the number of bars of pig iron he transported down a plank each day. All he did was pay the man more, linking higher output directly to higher wages -- hardly a revolutionary thought today. His solution for the gossipy ball-bearing inspectors was to separate them, shorten their working hours, increase their pay, and allow them to relax occasionally; in return, they were expected to work harder, and they did. Once Kanigel establishes that Taylor's method worked well (to a certain extent), the book becomes tough going. Despite his elegant prose, Kanigel's exhaustive treatment of his subject's life and experiments strained my interest. Do we really need to know, for example, that Taylor once spent months alternating the size of coal shovels in the name of furnace-stoking efficiency? Or the entire list of his vacation companions for one summer? Such biographical detail can add spice to a compelling narrative, but to include them only as an exercise in thoroughness, as Kanigel does, is simply tiring. Taylor simply is not interesting as a personality. Kanigel also glosses over many important issues. Taylorism really did devalue certian kind sof skilled labor, and the costs have been high. The "Taylorized" doctors of the HMO era, for example, must work with administrators peeking over their shoulders, dispensing pills at the expense of empathy and other unmeasurable healing skills. And once factory workers lost their control and even their comprehension of manufacturing processes, many ceased to take pride in their work and stopped making suggestions for improvement. This may be one reason why Japanese and European design is often superior to American. Taylorism also spawned the rise of management consulting, with its sham exercises and goals -- often a huge diversion of managerial talent in the name of efficiency. Kanigel, however, largely ignores this darker side of Taylorism; the true impact of his legacy gets lost in the details. The result is a 600-page profile of a narrow and compulsive man with a single, if influential, idea. Recommended, but only for scholars and specialists.
Rating:
Summary: 600 pages on a guy who had one good idea
Review: 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, 19th-century foremen would dock (!) their pay per item -- an obvious incentive for them to slow down. And because ball-bearing inspectors in a Fitchburg mill worked slowly and talked too much, they were forced to put in 101/2 -hour days, without breaks. Taylor witnessed such practices and decided to change them. In one of his most famous experiments, on "Schmidt", he got a common laborer to double the number of bars of pig iron he transported down a plank each day. All he did was pay the man more, linking higher output directly to higher wages -- hardly a revolutionary thought today. His solution for the gossipy ball-bearing inspectors was to separate them, shorten their working hours, increase their pay, and allow them to relax occasionally; in return, they were expected to work harder, and they did. Once Kanigel establishes that Taylor's method worked well (to a certain extent), the book becomes tough going. Despite his elegant prose, Kanigel's exhaustive treatment of his subject's life and experiments strained my interest. Do we really need to know, for example, that Taylor once spent months alternating the size of coal shovels in the name of furnace-stoking efficiency? Or the entire list of his vacation companions for one summer? Such biographical detail can add spice to a compelling narrative, but to include them only as an exercise in thoroughness, as Kanigel does, is simply tiring. Taylor simply is not interesting as a personality. Kanigel also glosses over many important issues. Taylorism really did devalue certian kind sof skilled labor, and the costs have been high. The "Taylorized" doctors of the HMO era, for example, must work with administrators peeking over their shoulders, dispensing pills at the expense of empathy and other unmeasurable healing skills. And once factory workers lost their control and even their comprehension of manufacturing processes, many ceased to take pride in their work and stopped making suggestions for improvement. This may be one reason why Japanese and European design is often superior to American. Taylorism also spawned the rise of management consulting, with its sham exercises and goals -- often a huge diversion of managerial talent in the name of efficiency. Kanigel, however, largely ignores this darker side of Taylorism; the true impact of his legacy gets lost in the details. The result is a 600-page profile of a narrow and compulsive man with a single, if influential, idea. Recommended, but only for scholars and specialists.
Rating: 
Summary: An Important Work
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Good Read for Students of Manufacturing
Review: I started my career as a manufacturing engineer and had often heard of Fred Taylor. Kanigel does a better job than most historians of making manufacturing history interesting. For me, there may have been a little more emphasis on Taylor's early life than I would normally be interested in, but Kanigel does an excellent job of defining Taylor. I had known that Taylor was famous for his time study techniques, what I didn't know was that he may have been partially or indirectly responsible for the advent and/or need for the human resources profession as well. He also had some involvement in cost accounting as it relates to calculating overhead rates for which I will be eternally disappointed in him for. He may have also been partially responsible for establishing the profession of manufacturing consultant as well. I am still enjoying the book and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in the history of manufacturing.
Rating:
Summary: The Most Influential Man of the 21st Century
Review: 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?
Rating: 
Summary: Dishing it out is one thing...
Review: Most people can dish it out a lot easier than they can take it. Frederick Winslow Taylor apparently typified this rule of thumb. Robert Kanigel gives due credit to Taylor, but portrays the father of scientific management as a thin-skinned hypocrite and a phony. Taylor's perfectly-logical theories--lowering production costs to increase the bottom line--paved the way (kinda) from small workshop manufacturing to low-cost mass production. Some potholes nonetheless remained. The changes that scientific management contained were bound to upset some apple carts. But Taylor was his own worst enemy. He was bereft of emotional intelligence, rarely if ever trying to win employee trust and cooperation. Browbeating and rebuking was his m.o. in a for-me-or-against-me ideology. Fred claimed his ideas were unassailable, principally by virtue of his having risen from the ranks of the "working men." He apparently beat the working-stiff attitude into the ground at every turn in his life. It was was one of two tongues he spoke with. The fact was, Fred Taylor was never a "working man" per se. His very birth put him a class apart. Young Fred Taylor studied at expensive private schools. He never had to worry about his next meal. Au contraire, he and his family ate the finest foods while they checked in and out of chic European resorts. Even with today's egalitarian travel packages, the number of American lathe operators who visit the Old Continent are small by comparison. In Taylor's day, European vacations were exclusively the lifestyle of the rich and famous. Fred deluded himself into thinking he was a garden-variety raggged dick but, like the down-and-out George Orwell, Taylor was a wannabee. There was always a way out. For the real working men, reality was sink or swim. Fred Taylor failed when he finally confronted his intellectual equals in Congress (a dubious distinction). Like an uncoached trial witness, he fell prey to basic court-room set ups. He initially denied insignificant evils! (for example, that the main objective of a firm is to earn money) which he should have acknowledged, then found it impossible to backtrack while saving face. Taylor also claimed complete credit for developing scientific management. In fact, he grasped several different pre-existing ideas (no shame in that), then wove them into scientific management. All in all, Kanigel's analysis seems sound, despite a rather belabored effort. He frequently provides in his text almost full bibliographic references for contemporary secondary sources (what are end notes for?). Kanigel also likes to ignite gossipy tidbits which have little bearing on the subject. He then fans the sparks into nearly complete chapters. It all serves only to pad an already-lengthy text.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting and worthwhile
Review: The context of everyday life is very important to understanding the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor, for in that time he began to change it radically. For this reason, Robert Kanigel's biography necessarily reads at times like a meditation on efficiency, on manufacturing, or simply on being a pioneer. The author is clearly up to the task. He also explains manufacturing and Taylor's studies, and the implications thereof, with great clarity and often with wit. This is one of the major strenghts of the work, for it allows Kanigel to communicate the importance of Taylor and Taylorism effectively to a general audience. Sometimes, though, he seems to get carried away -- as in the "Report from the End of the Century" that takes up 65 pages in the paperback edition. The text shines, but one wishes for more coverage of his personal life. Kanigel seems content to begin with an extended view of Taylor's boyhood and nearer relatives. Then in adulthood he relegates any other issues to microscopic sketches, each spliced into one point in the narrative whether all their elements belong there or not. We are not given a sense of how these relationships developed over time. Such a treatment only contributes to the choppiness and lengthiness of the narrative. But these problems do not much harm the quality of the biography as a whole.
Rating:
Summary: Fredrick Winslow Taylor in context and portrayed honestly
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Fredrick Winslow Taylor in context and portrayed honestly
Review: 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.
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