Unlock document.
This document is partially blurred.
Unlock all pages and 1 million more documents.
Get Access
ASSIGNMENT TOPIC 2: MANAGEMENT GURUS
1. Frederick Winslow Taylor: (1856-1915)
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American industrial engineer, who originated scientific
management in business. He was born in Germantown (now part of Philadelphia),
Pennsylvania.
In 1878, he began working at the Midvale Steel Company. He became foreman of the steel
plant and applied himself to studies in the measurement of industrial productivity. Taylor
developed detailed systems intended to gain maximum efficiency from both workers and
machines in the factory. These systems relied on time and motion studies, which help
determine the best methods for performing a task in the least amount of time. In 1898 he
became joint discoverer of the Taylor-White process, a method of tempering steel. Taylor
served as consulting engineer for several companies.
Taylor developed his management theories in his book *ƒ*…½*ƒ‚§Shop
Management*ƒ*…½*ƒ published in 1903, making it arguably the first scholarly work on
management. Although there were books and published pieces on what could be termed
"management" these were more of a "guide to" or trade publication on best practices.
*ƒ*…½*ƒ‚§Shop Management*ƒ*…½*ƒ approached the role of manager as a general
role with specific functions with respect to collaborative work.
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, *ƒ*…½*ƒ‚§The Principles of
Scientific Management*ƒ*…½*ƒ, in which he described how the application of the
scientific method to the management of workers greatly could improve productivity.
Scientific management methods called for optimizing the way that tasks were performed
and simplifying the jobs enough so that workers could be trained to perform their
specialized sequence of motions in the one "best" way.
After years of various experiments to determine optimal work methods, Taylor proposed
the following four principles of scientific management:
1. Management is a true science. The solution to the problem of determining fair work
standards and practices could be discovered by experimentation and observation. From
this, it follows, that there is "one right way" for work to be performed.
2. The selection of workers is a science. Taylors "first class worker" was someone suitable
for the job. It was managements role to determine the kind of work for which an employee
was most suited, and to hire and assign workers accordingly.
3. Workers are to be developed and trained. It is managements task to not only engineer a
job that can be performed efficiently, but management is responsible for training the
worker as to how the work is to be performed and for updating practices as better ones are
