Editorial Review:
The basis of modern organization and decision theory, this influential essay has motivated administrators and students of managerial technique for more than 80 years. The author discusses eliminating inefficiency through a system based on principles applicable to individual and collective activities. A ground-breaking, and still-inspiring work.
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Customer Reviews
Average Customer Rating: 
Historical pleasure 2008-11-15
This booklet is of course interesting from historical point of view. It is indeed surprising how simple things already seemed to be. Also now things seems to be very clear and simple, until we have to go to implementation. And on this issue the book is not giving much answers.
But, once again, it is nice to read for the historic perspective."
Thin Book with Rich Content 2008-08-30
This is a much thinner book than i had expected but it really packs a punch full of information about business process reengineering.
Shove it up your...  2007-12-14
Taylor was beloved by Bolsheviks and fascists and capitalists alike. Lenin saw him as his guiding light. Taylor's comrade-in-arms Henry Ford was Hitler's hero. And we can thank Mr Taylor the many dull, witless jobs we have today. Ah, there's nothing like the taylorized workplace! Management, division and subdivision of labour, dumbing-down, rocketing stress...
I would like to give Mr Taylor, on the part of my workmates and me, the middle finger.
Recommended from historical perspective 2007-01-10
The principles of scientific management has been waiting on my bookself for me to pick it up and actually read it for quite a while. Taylors book has had such an impact on the modern management ideas that I simply had to read the original work.
Before reading the book, I had my opinion ready (which is not a good thing). The ideas must be stupid, I thought. However, when starting to read the book, I was taken by the situation described by Taylor and the thinking he had behind his theory. Much of it made sense, at the time and was not so stupid at all. I've thus read it in one sit (it's not very thick either). So what's it about?
Taylor's ideas were about studying the work and finding the best method for doing work and then training the workers in following this best method. Finding this best method is "the science" and management is very much responsible for finding and improving the work of the workers. So, this creates the separation of planning and execution, which is often mentioned when talking about Taylorism.
Why did he do this? Much of the reasoning, which is very visible in his dialog between worker and manager, is that workers are too stupid to improve their own work. They have no education and they wouln't be able to actually think about their work and improve it. This might have been a fact in his life. However, if this is still true today, personally I would doubt it.
Taylor considered workers stupid. He makes quotes like "A trained gorilla would probably be better in the job than these man" (not exact quote). These statements made me very uncomfortable and therefore I've long doubted about whether it should be a 3 or 4 star rating.
I've still decided on a 4 start rating. The book is a classic and very valid in his time. I recommend everybody to read it AND REALIZE THAT TODAYS WORLD IS NOT THE SAME. Thus take the good ideas (improving your work) but leave the ideas which were related to their time (strict separation planning and execution).
Worth reading.
Insight into the Capitalist Mindset  2006-04-23
This book provides an incredible insight into the capitalist mindset and its (dehumanizing) treatment of employees, whereby employees are treated as objects which need to be squeezed to extract the most labor possible. If you've seen the documentary 'The Corporation,' you might remember that time trials are routinely used in sweatshops: the amount of time for doing every little action ("hammer the nail") is specified to a 1/1000th of a second. This book is the foundation of such management techniques.
The crucial motivation for this book comes from the realization that inefficiencies aren't just material (ie if we use less rubber in each boot, we can make more money) but inefficiencies also exist in personnel (ie this person could be working twice as fast and making us more money).
This book is fundamentally about distributed knowledge. Just as Wikipedia has become a centralized collection of knowledge which was previously distributed across thousands of people, Taylor's "planning committee" works in a similar way: it extracting and collects and studies the workers' knowledge of their own tasks. Upon finding the best (most efficient) methods for accomplishing each task, it redistributes that knowledge back to the workers creating a more efficient system.
An excellent and entertaining read. Highly recommended.
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