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 ¡§Shop Management¡¨ 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. ¡§Shop Management¡¨ 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, ¡§The Principles of Scientific Management¡¨, 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
References: 1. ¡§Management¡¨ Kathryn M. Bartol& David C. Martin Third Edition 2. ¡§Management¡¨ Richard L. Daft Fifth Edition 3. http://career.ft.com/BusinessEducation/gurusindex 4. http://www.business.com/directory/management/management_theory/management_theorists/ 5. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventors/taylor.htm 6. http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific 7. http://www.hbs.edu