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This epochal biography tells the story of Frederick Winslow Taylor--the first efficiency expert--whose ceaseless quest for the one best way influenced both Ford and Lenin and moved management guru Peter Drucker to include him, along with Freud and Darwin, as one of the three seminal makers of the modern world. of photos.

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Library Journal Review

In 1995, the Safelite Glass Corporation moved from hourly to piece-rate pay for its workers and realized a productivity increase of 20 percent per worker. After over 100 years, the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor, a management expert who emphasized such an approach to paying workers, still permeates the American work force. Kanigel (Apprentice to Genius, Johns Hopkins Univ., 1993) brings his winning writing style to this treatment of the enigmatic Taylor‘often called the "father of scientific management"‘whom Peter Drucker has said warrants a place alongside Darwin and Freud in the making of the modern world. Kanigel deftly shies away from a psychologically interpretive approach, drawing the reader right into the heart of life in late-19th-century America, the age of steam and steel (Taylor died in 1915). This rewarding and beautifully written work is a shoo-in as a best business book and will likely stand as the definitive work on Taylor. Essential.‘Dale F. Farris, Groves, Tex. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

Who has "probably had a greater effect on the private and public lives of the men and women of the 20th century than any other single individual?" Few people nowadays would answer, "Frederick Winslow Taylor" (1856-1915), the first "efficiency expert." But Kanigel (The Man Who Knew Infinity) thinks that this claim may not be an overstatement. Taylor, who came from a wealthy Philadelphia family, turned down Harvard and went to work in a foundry, then as an apprentice in a steel mill's machine shop, where he became a foreman by the time he was 24 (and won the U.S. Open doubles tennis championship the next year). Taylor later came to romanticize his years as a mill worker and referred to them often when charged with being antilabor, but it was as a "gang boss" that, armed with his ever-present stopwatch, he began what he considered his scientific "time and motion" studies of how long a worker took to do each step of a specific job‘and how long the best workers should take. He also managed to earn a degree in engineering from the Stevens Institute and went on to increase the efficiency of machines (as well as men). In the late 1890s, Taylor became a private consulting engineer, spreading his gospel of efficiency and eventually making a name‘and his fortune‘in high-speed steel manufacture. The so-called Taylor System became internationally known, and in 1912 he even had to defend it before a congressional committee formed to determine whether working people should be subjected to the rule of a clock. Kanigel's admiration for his subject is tempered with realistic skepticism. A most satisfying examination of a singular American life. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

CHOICE Review

Taylor is known to students of the history of US technology and technical management as the originator of "scientific management," a still-pervasive early-20th-century system for increasing industrial productivity based on detailed scientific time-studies of work procedures. The system prescribed "the one best way" of performing any task. Technology critic Jeremy Rifkin judged Taylor to have "probably...[affected]...the private and public lives of...[modern]...men and women [more] than any other single individual." The undecided question is whether this influence was positive or negative. Given this ongoing controversy, Kanigel's balanced biography (slightly pro-Taylor), with its wealth of detail on the development of, and controversies associated with, Taylor and his "system" is especially welcome. Kanigel finds Taylor, who after a privileged youth opted to become an apprentice machinist rather than attend Harvard, to be well-meaning though socially conventional and a versatile and competent engineer, but concludes that Taylor's "system" resulted more from Taylor than from science. Useful information for sociologists and historians of technology, and for metallurgy or machine tool operations faculty. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. G. E. Herrick; Maine Maritime Academy

Booklist Review

Frederick Taylor is well known as the "father of scientific management," yet an explanation of scientific management usually appears as just a sidebar in modern management textbooks, and "Taylorism" has become a synonym for oppressively monotonous working conditions. Taylor's principles, however, revolutionized modern industry and are still in evidence, for good or bad, in factories throughout the world. It can also be argued that automation is simply an extension of Taylor's ideas. Though references abound to Taylor, no recent biographical portrait of this influential figure exists. Frank B. Copley's dryly meticulous two-volume 1923 work was reprinted in 1969, and Sudhir Kakar provided a speculative psychoanalytic profile in 1970. Now Kanigel, who wrote Apprentice to Genius: The Making of a Scientific Dynasty (1986) and a 1991 biography of the mathematician Ramanujan, fills the void with this colorful, readable account of Taylor's fascinating life and his far-reaching influence. This is another in the popular Sloan Technology series. --David Rouse

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Robert Kanigel teaches at MIT and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.