When the young man who would revolutionize American industry turned down a chance to attend Harvard in 1874 for an apprenticeship in a Philadelphia machine shop, it was hardly because he foresaw the transformation of the world into what it is today - marked by a "fierce, unholy obsession with time, order, productivity, and efficiency," as Robert Kanigel describes it in his biography, The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency.
The truth was, Taylor's eyes were bad. And yet, 30 years before the first assembly line, armed with a surplus of work, a stopwatch, and a utopian thirst, he systemized scientific management, crusading it nearly singlehandedly through industry after industry. Its anthem was the scrape of the lathe, its banner the instruction card. A century has passed, and with it the promise of a radiant, mechanical heaven in which the interests of management and labor are forever joined. Most of us, though, have it pretty damn good because of Taylor.
At more than 600 pages, Kanigel's biography is an exhausting study of its subject's influence and psychology. Taylor comes across in various roles: fanatical bully; member of the first winning US Open doubles tennis duo; inventor of a process to manufacture high-speed steel that revolutionized industrial output. At times, the man seems little more than a slave to the development of his own system. "Studying the growth of grass plots," he lamented toward the end of his life, dogged by labor-sympathetic hearings on Capitol Hill, "is a great time consumer." So was the book. Occasionally, I was tempted to implement my own version of time management. And yet I took its length as a kind of charming inefficiency in the face of the spiritual emptiness that seeps through today's egalitarian consumerism.
But what would life be without this system? "Industrialized countries today enjoy material abundance so great we no longer see it," Kanigel states. "Many living today have never known life without radios, TVs, home freezers, power mowers, and computers." Twinkies, too, abound, and those marshmallow peanuts you find in drugstores.
"In the past the man was first. In the future the system will be first," Taylor was infamous for having said. It must have been a nice thought at the turn of the century, but what about today, when our collective appetites threaten to mar the planet?
##### The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency, by Robert Kanigel: $34.95. Viking: (800) 253 6476, on the Web at www.penguin.com/.
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