Capitalist Philosophers: The Geniuses of Modern Business – Their Lives, Times, & Ideas - Couverture rigide

Gabor, A.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0471492477 ISBN 13 : 9780471492474

Editeur : John Wiley & Sons, 2000

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Frederick Winslow Taylor

The Father of Scientific Management

The year 1899 marked the dawn of the American Century. Across the vast continent, the railroad barons were laying track that would weave distant towns together into the world's largest consumer market. On both coasts, immigrants came ashore, bringing with them a hunger for opportunity and the energy to fuel a young nation's growth. And at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Frederick Winslow Taylor was at work on what is remembered as his most famous industrial experiment--one that would define both the struggle and terms of industrial productivity for the coming century.

The focus of Taylor's experiment was the immigrant laborers themselves--Hungarians and Germans, most of them--whose job it was to haul bars of pig iron weighing ninety-two pounds each onto railroad cars. For two days, Taylor and two deputies observed ten men as they lugged bars of pig iron from the Bethlehem Steel yard to the railcars. Laboring at a backbreaking pace, Taylor's ten "Hungarians" each loaded an average of seventy-five tons of pig iron per day, nearly six times the previous rate.

On the basis of those observations, Taylor established a production quota. To complete a fair day's work, he determined, each worker would have to haul forty-five tons per day--an output level still about three times as high as the average output before Taylor appeared on the scene. To be sure, Taylor offered to pay men who met the quota a higher wage. But to the Bethlehem laborers, Taylor was simply asking too much. In the ensuing weeks it became clear that some of the men were physically incapable of meeting the quota. Others simply refused to try. Either way, the Bethlehem workers lost their jobs by the dozen. By some accounts, Taylor was so deeply hated by the men that he had to walk home under armed guard for fear of an attack on his life. Years later, Taylor, referring to his unhappy relationships with his workers, said, "It's a horrid life for any man to live, not being able to look any workman in the face without seeing hostility."

Into this tinderbox stepped "Schmidt," a German immigrant of "sluggish" intelligence but possessing the power and stamina of a forklift truck. Schmidt, according to Taylor, had just the "ox-like" mentality needed to do the brutish physical labor that Taylor demanded of his workers. Uncomplaining and apparently indefatigable, Schmidt met Taylor's quota, happy to collect a few cents of extra pay at the end of each day.

The story of Schmidt would become the defining allegory of scientific management, even though Taylor scholars point out that the story is misleading in almost every respect. The name Schmidt itself was a pseudonym, and most of the character traits imputed to the fictional Schmidt were invented by Taylor for dramatic effect. Moreover, according to Daniel Nelson, a leading Taylor scholar, the story was inaccurate in its description of "the nature of Taylor's contributions and the character of scientific management." For one thing, the Schmidt story failed to convey the power of Taylor's thinking: his rigorous analysis of processes and his maniacal efforts to systematize work, his pioneering studies of manufacturing processes, his penchant for invention, and his very real contributions to the science of steel fabrication.

The Schmidt story did, however, capture two important aspects of Taylorism: First, it conveyed "the essence" of Taylor's combative personality, including both his considerable class prejudices and his autocratic management style. Second, it revealed his utter inability to understand human nature, a shortcoming that became embedded in his ideas and carried into twentieth-century management practice. Yet for his time, Taylor was every bit as much of a maverick as Bill Gates and Thomas J. Watson. At a time when the work practices of individual laborers were more art than science, he raised fundamental questions about work processes and control. Achieving high productivity, he realized, would require standardizing tools and production techniques and imposing a level of control over labor that had never been attempted before.

Although he is best known for his attempts to make labor more productive, his work on tool steel, which revolutionized the use and fabrication of steel, were in many respects more successful. With the birth of large-scale manufacturing at the beginning of the century, his work on tool steel was every bit as important as the development of user-friendly software would be to the information age at the end of the twentieth century. Because his innovations with tool steel made it possible to dramatically speed up production, they helped to create the manufacturing conditions that demanded greater precision and control over labor. And it was his work on tool steel that won him legitimacy in the factory and explained why manufacturers backed his divisive attempts to increase labor productivity and overlooked his eccentric and difficult personality. "If Taylor preferred to see high-speed steel as a footnote to the larger cause he championed, out in the real world the influence often went the other way," writes Robert Kanigel, Taylor's biographer. High-speed steel provided the "opening into which the earth-moving wedge of the Taylor system could be slipped."

Taylor's life and Weltanschauung (of which the Schmidt story was a representative theme) were, in fact, emblematic of the rationalist spirit of the turn of the century and proved pivotal to defining modern industry as we know it today. Taylor's greatest contribution was in recognizing that scientific method was key to the success of industrialization, especially in running the new enterprises that were of a scale and scope heretofore unimaginable--factories so large they used small railroads to transport men around them, factories peopled by thousands of workers operating enormous, power-driven machines. The new manufacturing behemoths could not be managed with the casual methods and supervision of the relatively small plants of the so-called first factory period.

Taylor's effort to develop a science of management had a profound impact on American industry. Decades later, the key ideas and trends in management have sped along the tracks that Taylor laid. Henry Ford's assembly line was a logical extension of Taylor's efforts to break up and speed up individual production tasks. The detailed measurement of processes and systems of Robert McNamara's Whiz Kids, at both Ford and the Pentagon, represented a sophisticated, high-technology spin on scientific management. Similarly, the decades-long search for the Holy Grail of employee productivity--and the quest for the perfect incentive pay formula--can be traced back to Taylor's attempt to develop the first scientifically based formula for determining a labor rate that would produce the greatest output. Most recently, the reengineering craze of the 1980s, in which so-called turnaround experts gutted company payrolls in an employee-be-damned frenzy, echoed the excesses of Taylorism.

Indeed, Taylor was perfectly at home with the technology of industrialization and its logistical challenges. Where he was often completely out of his element was in his relations with people, especially those outside his class and immediate social circle. Thus, his most troublesome legacy involved his solutions to the "labor problem," which for a long time threatened to swamp the advances made by industrialization.

For the enterprising and the fortunate, the turn of the century represented a world of opportunity. But for the vast majority, the workplace was filled with peril. In Taylor's day, the average worker possessed little more than his capacity to work and his tools. Yet setting foot into a factory was fraught with risks that could end his livelihood any day. In heat-treating plants, such as steel foundries, the rate of serious and fatal injuries was well over 1 percent of the workforce each year. On the railroads, it was higher. Those who escaped with their lives intact worked in brick mausoleums with little natural light or ventilation and breathed the smoke and foul odors of hundreds of candles and kerosene lanterns. Toilets and water fountains were a rarity.

For their trouble, most industrial workers were paid barely enough to survive while they were working. Few laborers owned their own homes. And there was no safety net for those who were injured or those who were laid off during inevitable slowdowns. (While a few craft unions flourished in trades such as printing, mass production reduced the dependence of U.S. firms on skilled labor.)

Such conditions gave rise to the Socialist Party in 1901 and to the American labor movement. Although many European businessmen saw unions as an antidote to labor unrest, in the United States the mantra of individualism and free enterprise made unions anathema to most American companies. In fact, U.S. industrialists sometimes met the threat of labor unions with guns. And shoot-outs between factory owners and union organizers became another frequent cause of death, injury, and unemployment.

Like many of his peers, Taylor was an ardent opponent of unions. He understood, however, that workers at the turn of the century were not being paid fairly and that companies would have to pay higher wages to improve productivity. "The fundamental principle upon which industry seems now to be run in this country," he wrote, "is that the employer shall pay just as low wages as he can and that the workman shall retaliate by doing just as little work as he can. Industry is thus a warfare, in which both sides, instead of giving out the best that is in them, seem determined to give out the worst."

Taylor sensed the destructive force of labor-management antagonism, and sought to bring peace to the industrial battlefield. However, while he walked among the workers, his vantage point was wholly that of a Philadelphia Brahmin. ...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

Andrea Gabor recounts the development of modern business through the lives, times and ideas of the great thinkers – people such as Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming, Alfred Sloan, Abraham Maslow – who defined the art and science of business.
The Capitalist Philosophers is an engaging introduction to the great core ideas of management, full of colourful stories and brilliant insights into why the business world is the way it is today. Andrea Gabor explores the ideas and personalities that have shaped not only twentieth century business, but that also have helped make the corporation a pivotal institution in society today, such as: McNamara′s pioneering work in the use of quantitative methods to control the finances at Ford, techniques that, for better and for worse had such a great influence on American management following World War II.

The book traces the development of both scientific and humanistic tradition from the beginning of the century and follows the battle of ideologies on up to the present. By going back to the source, Gabor helps business people make smart, informed decisions about the future. One key premise of Capitalist Philosophers is that management is fundamentally about people, not technology. It is the story of how management has harnessed technology, force, persuasion and inspiration to get people to accomplish the goals of the organization. Almost every single one of the capitalist philosophers portrayed in this book had a significant impact on several major corporations with which they personally came in contact.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: John Wiley & Sons
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0471492477
• ISBN 13: 9780471492474
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 398