Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania - March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical engineer, promoter of the scientific organization of labor and is considered the father of Scientific Management. In 1878 he made his first observations on the labor industry in the steel industry. They were followed by a series of analytical studies on execution times and remuneration of work. The main points of his were key to scientifically determine the concept of standard work, create a mental revolution and a functional worker through various concepts that are taught from his work published in 1903 called Shop Management .

According to Antonio Siera Monra, Taylor began to lose his sight from his teens; In addition, his body was of a weak complexion and he could not participate in the games that the others organized such as baseball and tennis. «Forced to the degrading, for a boy, the role of spectator, he dedicated his life to conceive how to improve the performance of the physical effort wasted by the players through a more adequate design of the instruments used by them». This attitude would mark him for life, for him the important thing was to measure the effort, the place and the movements to obtain a vast amount of information and from there, take advantage in such a way that the greatest possible efficiency was given both in sport and in production.. His biographers also describe him as a person with an inflexible attitude towards the rules of the game "even a game of cricket represented a source of study and analysis for him."

Taylor's Theory

Before Taylor's proposals, workers were responsible for planning and executing their jobs. They were entrusted with the production and given the "freedom" to carry out their tasks in the way they believed was correct without having technical knowledge. The author describes it this way: “Foremen and shop managers know better than anyone that their own personal knowledge and skill is far below the combined knowledge and skill of all the men under their command. Consequently, even the most experienced managers leave the problem of selecting the best and most economical way of doing the job to their workers. Hence, his principles "seen in their historical perspective, represented a great advance and a new approach, a tremendous innovation against the system." It must be recognized here that Taylor represents the dream of an era, as is the United States of the early years of the XX century where it was imperative to achieve the highest possible efficiency, taking care of the environment coupled with an accelerated population explosion in cities, a growing demand for products.

There is a very particular difference between Taylor's and Henri Fayol's theory that turned out to be adjacent to the conjugal one of the United States system, in the use of tense, since Fayol focuses more on the general structure of the organization, while Taylor focused more on the method and tools of the job for better efficiency. Another difference between Taylor and Fayol is the area of the pyramid of the organization that they studied, one is the operational level that is Taylor's area of study while Fayol dedicated himself to the study of the upper area of the organization.

Taylor's Principles

In his book The Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911, he mentioned the principles that underpinned the scientific perspective of management and gave a new twist to the way work was done at that time., this is how the people who manage production must acquire new responsibilities as will be seen below. According to Taylor, management:

1. They develop a science for the execution of each of the work operations, which replaces the old empirical model.
2. They scientifically select the workers, train, teach and form them, while in the past each worker chose his own work and learned for himself how he could improve.
3. They cordially collaborate with the workers to ensure that the work is done in accordance with the principles of science that has been developed
4. Work and responsibility are distributed almost equally between management and workers. Management takes under its responsibility all that work for which it is more capable than the workers, while, in the past, almost all the work and most of the responsibility were thrown on the backs of the workers (Taylor, p. 43).
5. Study to promote better opportunities for the employee. The study of work is not done by consulting the worker, but in association with him.

Scientific Management

Taylor's desire to apply his revered “scientific management” went in the noble direction of achieving maximum prosperity for the employer, as well as maximum prosperity for the worker (Taylor, p. 21), even so, he later contradicts this affirmation saying that he has seen how workers who begin to have increases in their salary of more than 60% become "drinkers" and they begin to decrease their production and, thus, their quality of life; hence, 60% in the salary increase is for him, the maximum limit to be paid to whoever qualifies as an ox-type worker.

Some of Taylor's arguments should be cited for the application of his proposals. For him, man is lazy by nature, and he tries to hide behind it to slowly carry out his work, making the businessman believe that he is doing his best. Hence, the times and movements of these workers must be measured in order to study them and find the best combination of muscular movements to increase production and also give uniformity to the processes, which did not happen in the old system. For this, it was necessary to divide between those who think of the best ways to do the job and those who have the physical strength to execute it. The former were given the responsibility of training the latter until they obtained the best performance that their bodies could give. He also talks about task specialization, because in this way, the worker gains more time and skill by doing the same thing every day. The scientific organization of work according to Taylor.

The author affirms, without fear of being dismayed, that this lazyness constitutes the most acute of the evils affecting the workers of England and America.

Taylor himself explained the stages to operationalize his new scientific organization of work:

1. Find ten to fifteen workers (if possible in different companies and regions) who are particularly skilled at work to analyze.
2. Define the exact series of elementary movements that each of these workers carries out to execute the analyzed work, as well as the useful and material they use.
3. Determine with a chronometer the time necessary to realize each of these elemental movements and choose the simplest mode of execution.
4. Eliminate all misconception, slow or useless movements.
5. Having thus suppressed all useless movements, to gather in a sequence the fastest movements and those that best allow to use the best materials and useful.

F. W. Taylor: Principles of scientific direction, Management (1891)

Principle of Exception

The Exception Principle proposed by Taylor, in the field of administration, represents an information filter in which, according to his words: «... the administrator should receive condensed, summarized reports and invariably comparative, covering, however, all the elements that are of interest to the administration. Those summaries should be carefully checked by a helper before they reach the administrator, and also have all the good exceptions as well as the bad exceptions; an overall view of the progress made from reverses is obtained in a few minutes, and leaves the administrator the possibility of considering the lines of policy, and studying the character and adjustment of the important men under his command."

What Taylor suggests is relative autonomy to the different operating departments of the company and an Algedonic communication network that indicates the moment in which the hierarchy must start to function. This is the Exception Principle in the field of Business Administration.

In this way, Algedony (or the Principle of Exception) represents the mechanism that unites and integrates the concepts of autonomy of a subsystem with those of hierarchy between subsystems. Through this mechanism the freedom of the subsystems becomes effective and real. The subsystem will possess complete autonomy up to the limits of its ability to control its behavior. After that limit, the Algedonía makes it dependent on its subsystem hierarchically superior to it, within its own autonomy, solve the problem and restore the lost autonomy of the subordinate subsystem. Thus, he will continue to enjoy "freedom".

Obviously, if the immediately superior hierarchical system is unable to solve the problem of that subsystem, then it must go, in turn, to its higher level, thus also losing its autonomy, in relation to that particular problem.