Frederick Winslow Taylor

"The Big Money" by John Dos Passos has a section titled The American Plan (p. 15), which is a summary of the life of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856 - 1915) the founder of Scientific Management in the United States.

According to Dos Passos, the last act of Taylor before he died at 59 years of age was to check his watch.

For more information about the controversial life of Taylor, see the following link.

FWT

When I began my career in food manufacturing, Scientific Management was still practiced. I recall an industrial engineer with a special clipboard containing two stopwatches observing the workers in the act of doing a job. He made all sorts of notes.

In spite of this work, things did not speed up and productivity in the plant continued to suffer. The plant manager discontinued the "time study program" after several months. It was a ridiculous effort.

There was a time when most of Industrial Engineering and virtually all of Industrial Management, an academic program taught as a hybrid of engineering and management, concentrated on the work of Taylor. Eventually, Just-In-Time manufacturing from Japan replaced Scientific Management and many university Departments of Industrial Engineering began to shift focus toward computer simulation and operations research.

One of the interesting aspects of Taylor's work involved a focus on standards for industrial practice. The standards caught on quickly with senior managers and the ideas were taught at Harvard Business School among others.