The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency

About this book

A young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor chose a factory over Harvard,and his decision has made all the difference in the world as we know it today. Using what he'd learned as an apprentice in a machine shop, Taylor forged his industrial philosophy, Scientific Management--the source of our fierce, unholy obsession with "efficiency." According to management guru Peter Drucker, Taylorism is perhaps the "most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." Evoking a time when the industrial world was young, new, and exciting , Robert Kanigel illuminates the man whose ceaseless quest for "the one best way" changed the very texture and purpose of twentieth-century life.