—Frederick Winslow Taylor, lecturing on management, 1907
Among the laborers at Massachusetts’s Watertown Arsenal in the summer of 1911, there was one nearly universal source of complaint: a wellborn management consultant named Frederick Winslow Taylor. For nearly three years, Taylor and his aides had been stalking the arsenal, stopwatches in hand, timing workers at their various jobs in an attempt to improve the workers’ efficiency and eliminate wasted time. Turner hoped to discover and dictate an optimal, standardized time for the completion of every task undertaken in the plant, from sharpening tools to hauling materials to pouring the molds for the big coastal defense guns made there.
This was how Taylor made his living: he watched people work, measured the pace of their work as precisely as he could (which was not always so precisely), then wrote a long report to their bosses about how these people could do their jobs better and more quickly.
The workingmen of the arsenal called him Speedy.
The U.S. Army had hired Taylor to streamline the manufacturing operations at the arsenal, which turned out carriages for large seacoast cannon and field mortars. Taylor was already the go-to efficiency expert for industrialists hoping to maintain control of their increasingly complex businesses and, of course, maximize profits. He may have been the first of a species that would proliferate in the twentieth century: the high-priced, hotshot management consultant.
Born to a wealthy Philadelphia family, Taylor followed an eccentric path. Though he had been admitted to Harvard, the young Taylor instead took a job on the shop floor of a Philadelphia pump manufactory, rising to the position of machinist and ultimately chief engineer at the Midvale Steel Company in Nicetown, Pennsylvania. At the same time, he distinguished himself as an upper-crust club sportsman. He and a partner won a tennis doubles championship at the first U.S. Nationals in 1881 (where he used a racket of his own design); he later took fourth place in golf at the 1900 Olympics.
A gentleman not afraid to roll up his sleeves and sweat, Taylor was nevertheless miserable in his work. The problem was that his efforts to cajole more work out of the men beneath him earned him their contempt. Taylor was sensitive enough to be bothered by this. “It is a horrid life for any man to live, not to be able to look any workman in the face all day long without seeing hostility there,” he confessed.
During his sabbatical on the shop floor, Taylor came to recognize a problem where no one before had seen one: the tremendous variability in ways of accomplishing a simple task. Take, for example, shoveling sand. Sand shovelers might do their shoveling with their own tools, using their own techniques and at their own pace, which meant that there could be no uniformity of progress among workers assigned the same task. One sand shoveler might shovel much more sand than another sand shoveler, even though both sand shovelers were ostensibly tasked with the same mission, were to be compensated equally, and therefore might presumably be expected to shovel roughly equivalent quantities of sand.
Taylor noticed something else, too. Workforces tended to accommodate themselves to the pace of their slowest, most leisurely workers. Even a sand shoveler capable of shoveling a great deal of sand might not shovel at his most ambitious pace, for fear of showing up his fellow sand shovelers. Taylor called this phenomenon soldiering and said it was nearly universal.
Soldiering is related to procrastination, in that the soldierer sabotages the efforts of the collective the way a procrastinator frustrates himself. Reading Taylor’s scathing descriptions of “mentally sluggish” workers soldiering on the job, I couldn’t help but recognize myself. In retrospect, I could see that soldiering had been so much a part of my work life that I probably should have been wearing fatigues most of the time. At the grocery store where I worked in high school, it was understood that you didn’t stack apples at too rapid a pace; it would set a dangerous precedent. Carting out debris for the renovator who employed me in college, I figured out that working at too rapid a pace would only be rewarded with more wheelbarrow loads.
Speedy Taylor would have been horrified by either of these operations. But he was right about the ubiquity of soldiering. The urge to defy bosses, to loaf, to perversely do what we damn well know we shouldn’t be doing (or more relevantly, to not do what we damn well know we should be doing) is present in most jobs, especially those in which a workforce wants to flip management a metaphoric middle finger. In some contexts, soldiering may even be heroic, a variety of resistance. Some African slaves in the American South were known to disrupt or delay projects by moving at a shuffling pace, rather than conspire with the evil of chattel slavery. Some even poisoned themselves.
Radical dissents from late capitalism and consumerism are part of this history, too. The philosopher Guy Debord, the leading figure of the situationist movement, is most famous for a bit of writing that appeared not in a book, nor in a scholarly journal, but scrawled on a wall in the rue de Seine in 1953: Ne Travaillez Jamais (Never Work).
Debord really never did work. One of the things I learned when I looked into Debord’s biography is that his first wife supported him for a time by “writing horoscopes for racehorses.” It doesn’t sound like a promising career, but if you’re really set against working, career advancement doesn’t really matter, does it?
Not working was no mere matter of laziness for Debord. He saw it as an assault on order. (He also had one of his early books, Mémoires, bound in sandpaper so that it would damage neighboring books on a shelf.) Maybe you want to dismiss Debord and the situationists as anachronistic, typical of a certain radical moment in history. But parts of their ethic remain relevant even for the most unquestioning capitalist today. Take the situationist derive—an unplanned and aimless stroll through urban space in which obligations are ignored and chance leads an adventurer from new encounter to new encounter. Take away the walking, and the derive shares many elements—the chance connections seized upon, the curiosity indulged, the time wasted—of an afternoon spent jumping from link to link on the Internet.
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Taylor’s claims of analytical rigor in studying work were taken very seriously by the leading minds of the time. The future Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis was a big fan of Taylor’s and in 1910 came up with the term “scientific management” to describe a school of thought that included not only Taylor but also Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, pioneers of motion study. The Gilbreths even applied statistical rigor to raising a family. Their regimented approach to raising their twelve children inspired the book and film Cheaper by the Dozen.
The assumption behind Taylor’s analysis was laid out in his 1903 treatise Shop Management: Workers could not be trusted to perform their tasks competently on their own (they were, remember, “mentally sluggish” and “naturally lazy”) but needed direction from managers who could dictate a standardized, optimal technique and pace for any task. There was “one best way” to do any job—that was the phrase that came to be associated with Taylorism and efficiency—and it was up to management to discover that best way and impose it on the workforce.
At Midvale, Taylor had worked in the machine shop, where enormous, belt-driven machines cut steel locomotive tires to size. Taylor had studied the operation of the machines and broken the whole metal-cutting operation down to variables—the shape of the tool, the speed of the setting, the variety of metal—that could be quantified and reduced to equations workable on a slide rule. He wanted to bring a similarly machinelike efficiency to human operations. He saw his mission as a noble one and himself as a visionary, using science to bring opportunity and enlightenment to the laboring classes.
In fact, Taylor’s analyses were not really all that scientific. At Bethlehem Steel, where he was hired in 1898, he determined the best rate for loading pig iron by selecting “twelve large, powerful Hungarians” and challenging them to load sixteen and a half tons of iron as quickly as they could. It took them fourteen minutes. Then Taylor started tweaking the numbers, subjecting them to such formulae as the “law of heavy labo
ring,” which posited the ideal work-to-rest ratio. (Hint: it’s a lot to a little.) A little more manipulation of the data, and Taylor had his conclusion: a properly motivated—and constantly supervised—worker could load seventy-one tons per day.
Science, such as it was, had spoken. This figure was installed as the new standard at Bethlehem. To provide an incentive, Taylor set higher wages for those who were able to meet the standard. Those who refused to play along with the system were dismissed.
The workers, mostly recent immigrants, grumbled incessantly about Taylor and his college-boy aides trying to tell them how to do their work—just as the grunts later would grumble at Watertown. At the arsenal, laborers were especially touchy because they regarded Taylor’s scientific management as an affront to their contributions to the nation’s defense. It threatened their very patriotism. The striking molders there wrote in a petition that Taylor’s methods were “humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American.”
The strike at the arsenal lasted only a week, ending with the reinstatement of a worker who had been dismissed for balking at Taylor’s dictates. But it prompted an investigation by the Labor Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, giving Taylor an opportunity to explain his methods to the nation. It did not go well.
“I can say, without the slightest hesitation,” Taylor told the 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.”
When he compared a worker who would not meet his dictated time standards to “a bird that can sing but won’t sing,” one furious congressman responded, “We are not dealing with horses nor singing birds but with men who are part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.”
As a result of its investigation, Congress banned the use of stopwatches to time workers in factories.
Congress’s disapproval notwithstanding, Taylor’s ideas took root. The same year as the Watertown strike, Taylor published The Principles of Scientific Management, a volume that would become the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century. It can be considered a precursor to every business-success book found in every airport book kiosk today. Peter Drucker very enthusiastically called it “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.” Drucker placed Taylor alongside Freud and Darwin in a trio of thinkers responsible for the modern world. Taylor himself settled for calling his ideas “a mental revolution.”
He wasn’t wrong. Taylor’s ideas influenced Henry Ford as he developed his assembly-line systems. They also appealed to national leaders as disparate as Mussolini and Lenin. The Rationalisierung, or rationalization, of Weimar Germany made Taylorist efficiency and order the basis of an entire economy. Mitsubishi and other Japanese corporations embraced Taylorism as early as the 1920s and never let up in their admiration. When Taylor’s son visited Japan in the 1960s, executives from Toshiba begged him for pictures of his father, and for anything—a pencil perhaps?—once handled by the great man.
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A little skepticism about glib historical analogy is almost always warranted, but it’s not hard to see Taylor’s influence in our current attitudes about work, time, and productivity. “Budgeting our time,” as we are advised, means thinking about time in an economic sense, as a resource to be stewarded, marshaled, deployed wisely. (Isn’t it remarkable how much of our language concerning time is also the language of money? We spend time, waste time, save time, lose time.) To say that time is money is to employ cliché, but there really isn’t a more concise distillation of Taylor’s philosophy.
Taylor is the Ur-source of our obsession with productivity and efficiency in both personal and professional lives—though I’m not sure it still makes sense to refer to the two spheres as separate. To the extent that we are always aware of the clock ticking, to the extent that we feel there is never enough time for us to do the things we think need to be done, to the extent that we are all multitasking and writing memos to ourselves and moving from chore to chore as dictated by the pinging of an iPhone, we are living the legacy of Taylorism.
The critic Louis Menand has written about how ideas about “best practices” have a tendency to move from business schools to the general culture. The result is that we end up internalizing some ideal of personal competence that has little to do with the way people really live. We evaluate ourselves by the standards of this managed ideal and of course we are found wanting. We fail our own annual review.
We have been yoking the personal to the professional at least since the dawn of self-help. Even the first work of that genre, Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, depicts professional life as requiring total and constant commitment. Here’s Menand on Smiles: “One striking thing about the exemplary tales in Self-Help is the all-consuming nature of the careers they document. There is no separation between work life and private life. Personal prosperity and professional success coincide, and this elision became a staple of the genre. The secrets of success in business are the secrets of success in life.” One of those secrets, of course, is to maximize time as one would any precious resource. Thus, procrastination, a dysfunction in our relationship with time, is an obstacle to success. Only the truly self-defeating have no economy of time—they don’t save, it, don’t spend it wisely, don’t budget it. They kill it.
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I suppose my initial reaction, as I read more and more deeply into Taylor, was predictable: the reflexive disdain of a humanist for any authoritarian, data-driven program. But then something funny happened. I began to develop an appreciation for Speedy Taylor and his stopwatches. Anyone who has ever been plagued by indecision will know that sometimes what you want is someone to tell you what to do. I have spent enough of my life dithering, vacillating between this option and that, and ultimately doing neither, that I could see the advantage of having some stopwatch-wielding authority figure to save me from my self-sabotage.
Of course, only someone who doesn’t actually have to contend with a looming, stopwatch-wielding authority figure would be dense enough to think this way. If I did have such a person telling me what to do I would rebel as readily as Taylor’s steelworkers. Schedules imposed on me restrict my options. It’s not that I think defying those schedules—procrastinating—is necessarily heroic. Just totally human.
In Bruce Beresford’s film Black Robe, Jesuit missionaries in New France teach their Huron students to heed the orders of “Captain Clock,” literally a chiming timepiece that will tell them when to study, when to eat, when to pray. In one scene, when the clock chimes the hour, the Huron excitedly say, “Captain Clock is speaking!” Their excitement is rooted in a theology that gives the clock face the job of expressing the will of God.
Now that job goes to other devices: the Fitbit that tallies miles walked, the app that measures calories consumed. All the alerts, alarms, pings, and pokes that tell us what to do and when to do it might as well be updated versions of Taylor’s standardization program. For us, too, Captain Clock is speaking.
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I had started to worry about my work habits. By which I mean that I worried about my habit of not getting to work. There were some days when I felt a Taylor-like contempt for my own sluggishness. There were some days when entire hours, entire afternoons, slipped by, lost to coffee-making and texting and reading Wikipedia entries on jazz bassists.
I started most days with good intentions, but invariably became distracted or discouraged or otherwise knocked off track. Another day would slip away, unseized. Wasn’t there some way I could end this habit of squeezing my workday down to a sliver that slipped so easily through the cracks?
I know I’m not the only one wrestling with this problem. Days seem to be escaping from us, as if our lives have sprung a
leak, and the most common complaint one hears from a certain kind of professional-class complainer is that there just isn’t enough time for all that cries out to be done. Our offspring, voracious and relentless in their demands on our time, get a certain amount of blame for this situation. So do our jobs, which have expanded, bloblike, from the old punch-the-clock, Leave It to Beaver-esque, nine-to-five routine to today’s state of siege, with e-mails from the boss reaching us at night, in bed, just as we are starting to nod off.
The revolutionary connectivity of the Internet was supposed to let us work faster, smarter, better—and maybe it does, sometimes. But technology, of course, is also really good at distracting us. You know the drill. You sit down with your coffee, to work through your overnight e-mail. Inbox Zero beckons. You see that someone has sent you a link that demands your attention. This first link leads very quickly to a second. And while the first link had at least a tenuous claim on relevance to your professional duties, the second is wholly recreational, which is to say, much more irresistible. And there is always another link to follow, always more bait to bite at, always another carnivalesque headline (“16 Celebrity Yoga Pants Fails That You MUST See!”) to click on.
When you come up for air it is lunchtime, somehow.
Still ahead is the hollow afternoon feeling of listlessness and exhaustion that comes with this routine. This feeling is cousin to what used to be called acedia—an inability to take interest in the world. Our immersive technologies have left us, literally, to our own devices.
At one point my friend Laura, hearing about my troubles and wanting to help, commandeered my laptop, so that she could “reconfigure my settings.” Laura is as productive as I am dawdling, so I was willing to follow her lead. She set my computer so that I would be alerted to new messages less often, thus presumably reducing the risk of distraction. A good idea, I’m sure, but the truth is, this business of resetting my settings was deflating. It reduced what I liked to see as an existential crisis to something more along the lines of an IT interface problem. Could it be that all my soul-searching and self-doubt would really be ameliorated simply by resetting my settings? It was as if the world’s most vexed insomniac had gone to see a doctor, only to be told to drink a glass of warm milk before going to bed each night.
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