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"In the past man has been first. In
the future the System will be first," predicted Frederick
Winslow Taylor, the first efficiency expert and model for
all the stopwatch-clicking engineers who stalk the factories
and offices of the industrial world. Taylor influenced Ford's
assembly line and Lenin's Soviet Russia. Management guru
Peter Drucker has ranked him with Freud and Darwin as a
maker of the modern world. His ceaseless quest for "the
one best way" changed the very texture of twentieth-century
life.
In 1874, eighteen-year-old Taylor abandoned
his wealthy family's plans for him to attend Harvard, and
instead went to work as a lowly apprentice in a Philadelphia
machine shop, shuttling between the manicured hedges of
his family's home and the hot, cussing, dirty world of the
shop floor. As he rose through the ranks of management,
he began the time-and-motion studies for which he would
become famous, and forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific
Management.
To organized labor, Taylor was a slave-driver.
To the bosses, he was an eccentric who raised wages while
ruling the factory floor with a stopwatch. To himself, he
was a misunderstood visionary who, under the banner of Science,
would confer prosperity on all and abolish the old class
hatreds.
To millions today who feel they give up
too much to their jobs, Taylor is the source of that fierce,
unholy obsession with "efficiency" that marks
modern life. The assembly line; the layout of our kitchens;
the ways our libraries, fast-food restaurants, and even
our churches are organized all owe much to this driven man,
who broke every job into its parts, sliced and trimmed and
timed them, and remolded what was left into the work of
the twentieth century.
Evoking a time when the industrial world
was young, new, and exciting, when the sun streamed through
great factory windows and filtered through the smoke of
the shop floor, Robert Kanigel's epochal biography recounts
the life of the man who taught us not to stop and
smell the roses, and whose compulsions eerily foreshadowed
how we live and work today.
Robert Kanigel is the author of Apprentice
to Genius and The Man Who Knew Infinity, a National
Book Critics Circle Award nominee, Los Angeles Times Book
Prize finalist, and New York Public Library "Book to
Remember." He is the recipient of the Grady Stack Award
for science writing and many other awards, and has written
for such periodicals as The New York Times Magazine,
Civilization, and The Sciences. He lives in
Baltimore, where he teaches writing in the University of
Baltimore's publications design program.
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