Management Legend

Father of Scientific Management

Frederick Winslow Taylor Biography (1856-1915) 

Frederick W. Taylor, in full Frederick Winslow Taylor    (born March 20, 1856, Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.—died March 21, 1915, Philadelphia), American inventor and engineer who is known as the father of scientific management. His system of industrial management has influenced the development of virtually every country enjoying the benefits of modern industry.

Taylor was the son of a lawyer. He entered Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire in 1872, where he led his class scholastically. After passing the entrance examination for Harvard, he was forced to abandon plans for matriculation, as his eyesight had deteriorated from night study. With sight ... (100 of 599 words)

Educated early by his mother, Taylor studied for two years in France and Germany and traveled Europe for 18 months. In 1872, he entered Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, with the plan of eventually going to Harvard and becoming a lawyer like his father. In 1874, Taylor passed the Harvard entrance examinations with honors. However, due allegedly to rapidly deteriorating eyesight, Taylor chose quite a different path.

Instead of attending Harvard University, Taylor became an apprentice patternmaker and machinist, gaining shop-floor experience at Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philadelphia (a pump-manufacturing company whose proprietors were friends of the Taylor family). He left his apprenticeship for six months and represented a group of New England machine-tool manufacturers at Philadelphia's centennial exposition. Taylor finished his four-year apprenticeship and in 1878 became a machine-shop laborer at Midvale Steel Works. At Midvale, he was quickly promoted to time clerk, journeyman machinist, gang boss over the lathe hands, machine shop foreman, research director, and finally chief engineer of the works (while maintaining his position as machine shop foreman). Taylor's fast promotions reflected not only his talent but also his family's relationship with Edward Clark, part owner of Midvale Steel. (Edward Clark's son Clarence Clark, who was also a manager at Midvale Steel, married Taylor's sister.)

Midvale Steel Works Aerial View, 1879.

Early on at Midvale, working as a laborer and machinist, Taylor recognized that workmen were not working their machines, or themselves, nearly as hard as they could (which at the time was called "soldiering") and that this resulted in high labor costs for the company. When he became a foreman he expected more output from the workmen. In order to determine how much work should properly be expected, he began to study and analyze the productivity of both the men and the machines (although the word "productivity" was not used at the time, and the applied science of productivity had not yet been developed). His focus on the human component of production Taylor labeled scientific management.

While Taylor worked at Midvale, he and Clarence Clark won the first tennis doubles tournament in the 1881 US National Championships, the precursor of the US Open. Taylor became a student of Stevens Institute of Technology, studying via correspondence and obtaining a degree in mechanical engineering in 1883. On May 3, 1884, he married Louise M. Spooner of Philadelphia.

The Bethlehem Steel plant, 1896.

 

From 1890 until 1893 Taylor worked as a general manager and a consulting engineer to management for the Manufacturing Investment Company of Philadelphia, a company that operated large paper mills in Maine and Wisconsin. He spent time as a plant manager in Maine. In 1893, Taylor opened an independent consulting practice in Philadelphia. His business card read "Consulting Engineer - Systematizing Shop Management and Manufacturing Costs a Specialty". Through these consulting experiences, Taylor perfected his management system. In 1898 he joined Bethlehem Steel in order to solve an expensive machine-shop capacity problem. As a result, he and Maunsel White, with a team of assistants, developed high speed steel, paving the way for greatly increased mass production. Taylor was forced to leave Bethlehem Steel in 1901 after discord with other managers.

After leaving Bethlehem Steel, Taylor focused the rest of his career on publicly promoting his management and machining methods through lecturing, writing, and consulting. In 1910, owing to the Eastern Rate Case, Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Scientific Management methodologies become famous worldwide. In 1911, Taylor introduced his The Principles of Scientific Management paper to the American mechanical engineering society, eight years after his Shop Management paper.

On October 19, 1906, Taylor was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science by the University of Pennsylvania. Taylor eventually became a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In early spring of 1915 Taylor caught pneumonia and died, one day after his fifty-ninth birthday, on March 21, 1915. He was buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania.

Work

Taylor was a mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor is regarded as the father of scientific management, and was one of the first management consultants and director of a famous firm. In Peter Drucker's description,

Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years.

Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
3. Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" (Montgomery 1997: 250).
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Future US Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis coined the term scientific management in the course of his argument for the Eastern Rate Case before the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1910. Brandeis argued that railroads, when governed according to Taylor's principles, did not need to raise rates to increase wages. Taylor used Brandeis's term in the title of his monograph The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. The Eastern Rate Case propelled Taylor's ideas to the forefront of the management agenda. Taylor wrote to Brandeis "I have rarely seen a new movement started with such great momentum as you have given this one." Taylor's approach is also often referred to as Taylor's Principles, or, frequently disparagingly, as Taylorism.

Managers and workers

Taylor had very precise ideas about how to introduce his system:

It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing this cooperation rests with management alone.

Workers were supposed to be incapable of understanding what they were doing. According to Taylor this was true even for rather simple tasks.

'I can say, without the slightest hesitation,' Taylor told a congressional committee, 'that the science of handling pig-iron is so great that the man who is ... physically able to handle pig-iron and is sufficiently phlegmatic and stupid to choose this for his occupation is rarely able to comprehend the science of handling pig-iron.

Taylor believed in transferring control from workers to management. He set out to increase the distinction between mental (planning work) and manual labor (executing work). Detailed plans, specifying the job and how it was to be done, were to be formulated by management and communicated to the workers.

The introduction of his system was often resented by workers and provoked numerous strikes. The strike at Watertown Arsenal led to the congressional investigation in 1912. Taylor believed the laborer was worthy of his hire, and pay was linked to productivity. His workers were able to earn substantially more than those under conventional management, and this earned him enemies among the owners of factories where scientific management was not in use.

Economics Legend

Father of Modern Economics

Adam Smith Biography (1723-1790)

 Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. He has become famous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was the son of the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact date of his birth is unknown. However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, his father having died some six months previously. 

At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university, studying moral philosophy under "the never-to-be-forgotten" Francis Hutcheson (as Smith called him). In 1740 he entered Balliol college, Oxford, but as William Robert Scott has said, "the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework," and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748 he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames. Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but later he took up the subject of "the progress of opulence," and it was then, in his middle or late 20s, that he first expounded the economic philosophy of "the obvious and simple system of natural liberty" which he was later to proclaim to the world in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. About 1750 he met David Hume, who became one of the closest of his many friends. 

In 1751 Smith was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow university, transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy. His lectures covered the field of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and political economy, or "police and revenue." In 1759 he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures. This work, which established Smith's reputation in his own day, is concerned with the explanation of moral approval and disapproval. His capacity for fluent, persuasive, if rather rhetorical argument is much in evidence. He bases his explanation, not as the third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, on a special "moral sense,"nor, like Hume, to any decisive extent on utility,but on sympathy. There has been considerable controversy as how far there is contradiction or contrast between Smith's emphasis in the Moral Sentiments on sympathy as a fundamental human motive, and, on the other hand, the key role of self-interest in the The Wealth of Nations. In the former he seems to put more emphasis on the general harmony of human motives and activities under a beneficent Providence, while in the latter, in spite of the general theme of "the invisible hand" promoting the harmony of interests, Smith finds many more occasions for pointing out cases of conflict and of the narrow selfishness of human motives. 

Smith now began to give more attention to jurisprudence and political economy in his lecture and less to his theories of morals. An impression can be obtained as to the development of his ideas on political economy from the notes of his lectures taken down by a student in about 1763 which were later edited by E. Cannan (Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms,1896), and from what Scott, its discoverer and publisher, describes as "An Early Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations, which he dates about 1763.  

At the end of 1763 Smith obtained a lucrative post as tutor to the young duke of Buccleuch and resigned his professorship. From 1764-66 he traveled with his pupil, mostly in France, where he came to know such intellectual leaders as Turgot, D'Alembert, AndréMorellet, Helvétius and, in particular, Francois Quesnay, the head of the Physiocratic school whose work he much respected. On returning home to Kirkcaldy he devoted much of the next ten years to his magnum opus, which appeared in 1776. In 1778 he was appointed to a comfortable post as commissioner of customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Edinburgh. He died there on July 17, 1790, after a painfull illness. He had apparently devoted a considerable part of his income to numerous secret acts of charity. 

Shortly before his death Smith had nearly all his manuscripts destroyed. In his last years he seems to have been planning two major treatises, one on the theory and history of law and one on the sciences and arts. The posthumously published Essays on Philosophical Subjects (1795) probably contain parts of what would have been the latter treatise. 

The Wealth of Nations has become so influential since it did so much to create the subject of political economy and develop it into an autonomous systematic discipline. In the western world, it is the most influential book on the subject ever published. When the book, which has become a classic manifesto against mercantalism, appeared in 1776, there was a strong sentiment for free trade in both Britain and America. This new feeling had been born out of the economic hardships and poverty caused by the war. However, at the time of publication, not everybody was convinced of the advantages of free trade right away: the British public and Parliament still clung to mercantilism for many years to come (Tindall and Shi). However, controversial views have been expressed as to the extent of Smith's originality in The Wealth of Nations. Smith has been blamed for relying too much on the ideas of great thinkers such as David Hume and Montesquieu. Nevertheless, The Wealth of Nations was the first and remains the most important book on the subject of political ecomomy until this present day. 

Accounting Legend

Father of Accounting

Luca Pacioli Biography

Luca Pacioli's father was Bartolomeo Pacioli, but Pacioli does not appear to have been brought up in his parents house. He lived as a child with the Befolci family in Sansepolcro which was the town of his birth. This town is very much in the centre of Italy about 60 km north of the city of Perugia. As far as Pacioli was concerned, perhaps the most important feature of this small commercial town was the fact that Piero della Francesca had a studio and workshop in there and della Francesca spent quite some time there despite frequent commissions in other town.

 

Although we know little of Pacioli's early life, the conjecture that he may have received at least a part of his education in the studio of della Francesca in Sansepolcro must at least have a strong chance of being correct. One reason that this seems likely to be true is the extensive knowledge that Pacioli had of the work of Piero della Francesca and Pacioli's writings were very strongly influenced by those of Piero. 

Pacioli moved away from Sansepolcro while he was still a young lad. He moved to Venice to enter the service of the wealthy merchant Antonio Rompiasi whose house was in the highly desirable Giudecca district of that city. One has to assume that Pacioli was already well educated in basic mathematics from studies in Sansepolcro and he certainly must have been well educated generally to have been chosen as a tutor to Rompiasi's three sons. However, Pacioli took the opportunity to continue his mathematical studies at a higher level while in Venice, studying mathematics under Domenico Bragadino. During this time Pacioli gained experience both in teaching, from his role as tutor, and also in business from his role helping with Rompiasi's affairs.

It was during his time in Venice that Pacioli wrote his first work, a book on arithmetic which he dedicated to his employer's three sons. This was completed in 1470 probably in the year that Rompiasi died. Pacioli certainly seemed to know all the right people for he left Venice and travelled to Rome where he spent several months living in the house of Leone Battista Alberti who was secretary in the Papal Chancery. As well as being an excellent scholar and mathematician, Alberti was able to provide Pacioli with good religious connections. At this time Pacioli then studied theology and, at some time during the next few years, he became a friar in the Franciscan Order.

 

In 1477 Pacioli began a life of travelling, spending time at various universities teaching mathematics, particularly arithmetic. He taught at the University of Perugia from 1477 to 1480 and while there he wrote a second work on arithmetic designed for the classes that he was teaching. He taught at Zara (now called Zadar or Jadera in Croatia but at that time in the Venetian Empire) and there wrote a third book on arithmetic. None of the three arithmetic texts were published, and only the one written for the students in Perugia has survived. After Zara, Pacioli taught again at the University of Perugia, then at the University of Naples, then at the University of Rome. Certainly Pacioli become acquainted with the duke of Urbino at some time during this period. Pope Sixtus IV had made Federico da Montefeltro the duke of Urbino in 1474 and Pacioli seems to have spent some time as a tutor to Federico's son Guidobaldo who was to become the last ruling Montefeltro when his father died in 1482. The court at Urbino was a notable centre of culture and Pacioli must have had close contact with it over a number of years.

In 1489, after two years in Rome, Pacioli returned to his home town of Sansepolcro. Not all went smoothly for Pacioli in his home town, however. He had been granted some privileges by the Pope and there was a degree of jealousy among the men from the religious orders in Sansepolcro. In fact Pacioli was banned from teaching there in 1491 but the jealousy seemed to be mixed with a respect for his learning and scholarship for in 1493 he was invited to preach the Lent sermons.

During this time in Sansepolcro, Pacioli worked on one of his most famous books the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita which he dedicated to Guidobaldo, the duke of Urbino. Pacioli travelled to Venice in 1494 to publish the Summa. The work gives a summary of the mathematics known at that time although it shows little in the way of original ideas. The work studies arithmetic, algebra, geometry and trigonometry and, despite the lack of originality, was to provide a basis for the major progress in mathematics which took place in Europe shortly after this time. As stated in the Summa was:-

... not addressed to a particular section of the community. An encyclopaedic work (600 pages of close print, in folio) written in Italian, it contains a general treatise on theoretical and practical arithmetic; the elements of algebra; a table of moneys, weights and measures used in the various Italian states; a treatise on double-entry bookkeeping; and a summary of Euclid's geometry. He admitted to having borrowed freely from Euclid, Boethius, Sacrobosco, Fibonacci, ...

The geometrical part of L Pacioli's Summa [Venice, 1494] in Italian is one of the earliest printed mathematical books. Pacioli broadly used Euclid's Elements, retelling some parts of it. He referred also to Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci).

Ludovico Sforza was the second son of Francesco Sforza, who had made himself duke of Milan. When Francesco died in 1466, Ludovico's elder brother Galeazzo Sforza became duke of Milan. However, Galeazzo was murdered in 1476 and his seven year old son became duke of Milan. Ludovico, after some political intrigue, became regent to the young man in 1480. With very generous patronage of artists and scholars, Ludovico Sforza set about making his court in Milan the finest in the whole of Europe. In 1482 Leonardo da Vinci entered Ludovico's service as a court painter and engineer. In 1494 Ludovico became the duke of Milan and, around 1496, Pacioli was invited by Ludovico to go to Milan to teach mathematics at Ludovico Sforza's court. This invitation may have been made at the prompting of Leonardo da Vinci who had an enthusiastic interest in mathematics.

At Milan Pacioli and Leonardo quickly became close friends. Mathematics and art were topics which they discussed at length, both gaining greatly from the other. At this time Pacioli began work on the second of his two famous works, Divina proportione and the figures for the text were drawn by Leonardo. Few mathematicians can have had a more talented illustrator for their book! The book which Pacioli worked on during 1497 would eventually form the first of three books which he published in 1509 under the title Divina proportione (see for example ). This was the first of the three books which finally made up this treatise, and it studied the 'Divine Proportion' or 'golden ratio' which is the ratio a : b = b : (a + b). It contains the theorems of Euclid which relate to this ratio, and it also studies regular and semiregular polygons (see in particular for a discussion of Pacioli's work on regular polygons). Clearly the interest of Leonardo in this aesthetically satisfying ratio both from a mathematical and artistic point of view was an important influence on the work. The golden ratio was also of importance in architectural design and this topic was to form the second part of the treatise which Pacioli wrote later. The third book in the treatise was a translation into Italian of one of della Francesca's works.

Louis XII became king of France in 1498 and, being a descendant of the first duke of Milan, he claimed the duchy. Venice supported Louis against Milan and in 1499 the French armies entered Milan In the following year Ludovico Sforza was captured when he attempted to retake the city. Pacioli and Leonardo fled together in December 1499, three months after the French captured Milan. They stopped first at Mantua, where they were the guests of Marchioness Isabella d'Este, and then in March 1500 they continued to Venice. From Venice they returned to Florence, where Pacioli and Leonardo shared a house.

The University of Pisa had suffered a revolt in 1494 and had moved to Florence. Pacioli was appointed to teach geometry at the University of Pisa in Florence in 1500. He remained in Florence, teaching geometry at the university, until 1506. Leonardo, although spending ten months away working for Cesare Borgia, also remained in Florence until 1506. Pacioli, like Leonardo, had a spell away from Florence when he taught at the University of Bologna during 1501-02. During this time Pacioli worked with Scipione del Ferro and there has been much conjecture as to whether the two discussed the algebraic solution of cubic equations. Certainly Pacioli discussed this topic in the Summa and some time after Pacioli's visit to Bologna, del Ferro solved one of the two cases of this classic problem.

During his time in Florence Pacioli was involved with Church affairs as well as with mathematics. He was elected the superior of his Order in Romagna and then, in 1506, he entered the monastery of Santa Croce in Florence. After leaving Florence, Pacioli went to Venice where he was given the sole rights to publish his works there for the following fifteen years. In 1509 he published the three volume work Divina proportione and also a Latin translation of Euclid's Elements. The first printed edition of Euclid's Elements was the thirteenth century translation by Campanus which had been published in printed form in Venice in 1482. Pacioli's edition was based on that of Campanus but it contained much in the way of annotation by Pacioli himself. 

In 1510 Pacioli returned to Perugia to lecture there again. He also lectured again in Rome in 1514 but by this time Pacioli was 70 years of age and nearing the end of his active life of scholarship and teaching. He returned to Sansepolcro where he died in 1517 leaving unpublished a major work De Viribus Quantitatis on recreational problems, geometrical problems and proverbs. This work makes frequent reference to Leonardo da Vinci who worked with him on the project, and many of the problems in this treatise are also in Leonardo's notebooks. Again it is a work for which Pacioli claimed no originality, describing it as a compendium.

Despite the lack of originality in Pacioli's work, his contributions to mathematics are important, particularly because of the influence which his book were to have over a long period. In the importance of Pacioli's work is discussed, in particular his computation of approximate values of a square root (using a special case of Newton's method), his incorrect analysis of certain games of chance (similar to those studied by Pascal which gave rise to the theory of probability), his problems involving number theory (similar problems appeared in Bachet's compilation), and his collection of many magic squares.

In 1550 there appeared a biography of Piero della Francesca written by Giorgio Vasari. This biography accused Pacioli of plagiarism and claimed that he stole della Francesca's work on perspective, on arithmetic and on geometry. This is an unfair accusation, for although there is truth that Pacioli relied heavily on the work of others, and certainly on that of della Francesca in particular, he never attempted to claim the work as his own but acknowledged the sources which he used.