What did Fredrick Taylor mean by the phrase ‘the one best way’? How did he go about implementing this approach to the completion of a work task?
Fredrick Winslow Taylor was a management theorist of the labour theorist who introduced the scientific management theory during the 20th century (1911), his management theories are still implemented within organisations in today’s business society. The phrase ‘the one best way’ was used by Taylor to state there is one best way to do a job using a scientific approach to ensure tasks were performed the most efficient way to help reduce costs and still maximising output. In an era where there was a high level of employment of workers for factories, there was a fundamental concern for capitalists on how to make workers work more to increase output. Taylor wanted to control the motion of workers to achieve his goal of maximising output per dollar spent on wages using scientific experiments.
At a point in Taylor’s career, he worked in a factory with the tasks of operating machines at the Midvale Steel Company outside Philadelphia; this was the starting point where Taylor’s scientific approach and identifying the one best way to complete tasks was established. Whilst Taylor was working in this factory he found that workers were not working to their full potential and that workers would choose to work at this level, this was known as soldiering. Soldiering was made possible as capitalists were unable to identify how much workers could produce within a day.
Working for Midvale Steel, Taylor soon became manager where his goal was to increase output, this caused a disagreement between workers below him and himself as workers refused to work hard to help increase output. This was the first scientific experiment that Taylor conducted, Taylor would make employees do specific task and showed them it was possible to increase output, he would then make workers attempt tasks to see whether they could adopt the same methods. Workers...