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Chapter 9
The Cult of Scientific Management
On the night of June 9, 1834, a group of prominent men "chiefly engaged in
commerce" gathered privately in a Boston drawing room to discuss a scheme
of universal schooling. Secretary of this meeting was William Ellery
Channing, Horace Mann’s own minister as well as an international figure and
the leading Unitarian of his day. The location of the meeting house is not
entered in the minutes nor are the names of the assembly’s participants apart
from Channing. Even though the literacy rate in Massachusetts was 98
percent, and in neighboring Connecticut, 99.8 percent, the assembled
businessmen agreed the present system of schooling allowed too much to
depend upon chance. It encouraged more entrepreneurial exuberance than the
social system could bear.
— The minutes of this meeting are Appleton Papers collection,
Massachusetts Historical Society
Frederick W. Taylor
The first man on record to perceive how much additional production could be extracted from
close regulation of labor was Frederick Winslow Taylor, son of a wealthy Philadelphia lawyer.
"What I demand of the worker," Taylor said, "is not to produce any longer by his own initiative,
but to execute punctiliously the orders given down to their minutest details."
The Taylors, a prominent Quaker family from Germantown, Pennsylvania, had taken Freddy to
Europe for three years from 1869 to 1872, where he was attending an aristocratic German
academy when von Moltke’s Prussian blitzkrieg culminated in the French disaster at Sedan and a
German Empire was finally proclaimed, ending a thousand years of disunion. Prussian schooling
was the widely credited forge which made those miracles possible. The jubilation which spread
through Germany underlined a presumably fatal difference between political systems which
disciplined with ruthless efficiency, like Prussia’s socialist paradise, and those devoted to whimsy
and luxury, like France’s. The lesson wasn’t lost on little Fred.
Near the conclusion of his Principles of Scientific Management 1 (1911), published thirty-nine
years later, Taylor summarized the new managerial discipline as follows:
1. A regimen of science, not rule of thumb.
2. An emphasis on harmony, not the discord of competition.
3. An insistence on cooperation, not individualism.
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