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Frederick Taylor and His Contribution to Industrial Management

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Frederick Taylor and his Contribution to Industrial Management

By
Isom Coleman III

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for Masters of Science Degree in Workforce Education Leadership Program

Fall 2014

How did current management theories develop?
People have been managing work for hundreds of years, and we can trace formal management ideas to the 1700s.
But the most significant developments in management theory emerged in the 20th century. We owe much of our understanding of managerial practices to the many theorists of this period, who tried to understand how best to conduct business.
Historical Perspective
One of the earliest of these theorists was Frederick Winslow Taylor. Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He was one of the first management consultants. Taylor was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era. Taylor summed up his efficiency techniques in his book The Principles of Scientific Management.
He started the Scientific Management movement, and he and his associates were the first people to study the work process scientifically. They studied how work was performed, and they looked at how this affected worker productivity. Taylor's philosophy focused on the belief that making people work as hard as they could was not as efficient as optimizing the way the work was done.
In 1909, Taylor published "The Principles of Scientific Management." In this, he proposed that by optimizing and simplifying jobs, productivity would increase. He also advanced the idea that workers and managers needed to cooperate with one another. This was very different from the way work was typically done in businesses beforehand. A factory

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