The Man with the Plan

Brink Lindsey from the January 1998 issue

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To implement the gathering and analysis of all this previously hidden knowledge, Taylor envisioned new kinds of managers who prepared the detailed instruction cards, planned the use of and set the machinery, and generally coordinated who did what, when, and in what order. Taylor bucked the traditional perception of white-collar workers as "nonproductive" by redefining their jobs. Under Taylor's system, shop bosses were no longer browbeaters; they were knowledge workers.

Once management gained control of the production process by consolidating and systematizing information about it, Taylor believed the stage was set for solution of the "labor problem"--the zero-sum conflict between capital and labor over compensation. First of all, the question of how much work could be done would no longer be resolved by a test of wills; it would be resolved by "science," in the form of time studies. Next, differential piece rates would be established so that workers would receive a substantial pay increase if they met management's output targets; furthermore, there would be a strict ban on rolling back piece rates after they had been set "scientifically."

Through achieving substantial gains in productivity and sharing those gains with the workers, Taylor envisioned a way out of the traditional impasse: "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 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." Under scientific management, the old zero-sum rancor would give way to positive-sum mutuality of interest.

So far, so good for Taylor's system. By breaking down the old craft system and subjecting shop practices to rigorous analytical scrutiny, scientific management allowed the incentive-creating signals of the marketplace to penetrate--for the first time--all the way to the factory floor. It is not saying too much to conclude that Taylor opened up a new world for the capitalist discovery process to explore.

And although Taylor's hope that labor-management conflict would disappear proved utopian, the truth is that he only exaggerated his case rather than misstating it. The productivity gains that scientific management and its offspring created did spur rising living standards, and this generalized affluence did in time, if not eliminate class conflict, at least quench its revolutionary combustibility. Once "working class" people owned their own homes with washer/dryers and color TVs and two cars in the driveway, the "labor problem" as a threat to social peace had indeed been solved. Taylor had the vision to prophesy that outcome, and the genius and tenacity to help it come true.

Notwithstanding its considerable virtues, Taylor's system was marred with terrible flaws. While grasping that systematic knowledge gathering was the key to industrial development, Taylor then insisted on imposing needless and perverse limits on that process. He tended to see knowledge work as a finite task, rather than a continuous and never-ending process; moreover, he treated it as the exclusive preserve of an elite few, rather than something that should be diffused as broadly as possible.

The whole notion of "the one best way" betrays a crabbed and static conception of management. In this view, optimal practices are deterministic and stable over time; once they are discovered, all that remains is routine implementation. Needless to say, this approach looks hopelessly retrograde from our Information Age perspective. For helping to build a corporate culture in which standard operating procedures were holy writ and the "not invented here" syndrome reigned supreme, Taylor deserves the opprobrium that is heaped upon him by today's "creative destruction" enthusiasts.

Even worse, Taylor's belief in a rigid separation between planning and doing was antithetical to the integration of the workplace and marketplace that scientific management sought to achieve. There is no mistaking Taylor's views on this subject; he had no use for workers from the neck up. "In our scheme, we do not ask for the initiative of our men," he said. "We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick."

This ruthless top-downism became the norm in American industry, and its effect has been nothing short of disastrous. Taylor's utopian solution became instead a Faustian bargain: We'll bribe you to check your brains at the factory gate. As a result, productivity has been hobbled by cutting off management from all of the potentially useful information that resides in the heads of workers; furthermore, generations of workers have been alienated by a system that treats them as inanimate objects. We are only now beginning to overcome the serious dysfunctions caused by this bargain. Much of the dislocation and pain caused by corporate restructurings over the past decade can be laid at the feet of Frederick Taylor.

And in the broader view, Taylor's misplaced confidence in know-it-all technocrats is of a piece with the great collectivist tragedies of this century. It's not surprising that Lenin was a Taylorite, or that Yevgeni Zamyatin's dystopian We identified Taylor as the chief prophet of its imagined future totalitarian state.

In both his virtues and his flaws, Frederick Taylor was a man of his era. The Industrial Revolution was a time of both prodigious creativity and profound misunderstanding. A new world based on competition and diffused brainpower was being constructed, but its leading builders saw instead a brave new world of all-controlling technocrats. For his part, Taylor did much to unleash creativity, but also to stifle and misdirect it. For better and for worse, in our liberating affluence and our strangling bureaucracy, we are inheritors of Taylor's hopeful, troubled legacy.