Taylorism: Work Faster!

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0:14Hey and welcome to the podcast I'm Josh and there's Chuck And Jerry's here too Timing us, telling us to hurry up Scowling at us even Which makes this another average episode Of Stuff You Should Know She said, get this in 45 minutes on the nose. No more, no less. And then she went and walked out of the room holding a pillow. Was that me or Jerry? That was Jerry. Okay. I'm usually the timekeeper. Are you? I never noticed. With your new swatch? Yeah. No, I just feel like I'm the one that's like 45 minutes, and you're like, no, let's make it three hours. I don't like three-hour podcasts, but I also don't like living under the clock, which is why I probably would not have personally liked Frederick Winslow Taylor.

1:03Yeah. Should we talk about this guy? I don't think we have any choice. And by the way, this is not a biopic. It's not a biography or a profile. It's about a man that you can't not talk about, but really this is about his whole system. Okay? I just want to make that clear. To you specifically. People are like, well, I don't want to hear about that guy. Well, T.S., you're going to have to. Big thanks to Livia because she pushed out another banger here. Thanks in part by this great, great article in The New Yorker from Jill Lepore, who Livia calls a genius. Absolute genius, in fact, is a quote. She definitely is.

1:45Great article anyway. Anyway, I think the setup that Livia gave is kind of worthy of going over a little bit because when you look at the 1900 through the 1920s and 30s, you looked at an America that was really changing in that these huge industrial revolution-born industries were all of a sudden like, hey, now we're kind of corporations and now we have middle managers and CEOs and things. and it's a little different than it used to be. Right. And so we need to start kind of really thinking about how to squeeze every dime out of this company we can and make these workers, and we'll call it efficiency, but between us, let's say, let's call it working them to the bone until they're near exhaustion so we can maximize profits.

2:38Yeah, and I could just hear our left-leaning listeners going, boo, hiss. But efficiency was not in and of itself a naughty word on either side of the political spectrum at the time because you could also hope that a more efficient factory or a more efficient workforce or a more efficient whatever would increase productivity but also give workers like more free time and then ideally a larger share of the profit in the form of higher wages. Right. That's how that works. Right. Exactly. I mean, I can't imagine a more naive progressive movement than that, but that's exactly what they were hoping for.

3:18But not just hoping for, they were fighting for it, agitating for it, doing whatever they could, taking it to the courts. Sometimes they were successful, but I think we all know, spoiler alert, in the long run, they lost thus far. That's right. And a lot of the work being done on efficiency can be laid at the feet of a person and then some other people. But initially, at least, this guy that you mentioned, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who was from Philadelphia, born in 1856, had an attorney father, an abolitionist mother, a very smart guy and was all set to take Harvard by storm before his eyesight started to fail.

3:58Right. After that got better, he may not have gone to Harvard, but he was still a really smart guy and ended up studying engineering at night and became a chief engineer for the Enterprise Hydraulic Works in Philly and then Midvale Steel Company. Yeah, Midvale Steel Company, that's where he really made his name. I think that's where he became the chief engineer. And one of the things he did as he was working his way up was he was, I guess, out of the gate, obsessed or at least deeply interested with the idea of doing something in the least number of movements, the most precise way, the most foolproof way.

4:41And that if you studied a task closely enough and understood it well enough, you could find the most efficient way to do it. And so over his 26-year career at Midvale, he conducted more than 30 ,000 experiments in metal cutting, figuring out which tool went with which motion, went with how to grab the tool the best way. And from that, he ended up writing a book called On the Art of Cutting Metals in 1907. And from what I saw for years and years, that was considered like a Bible in the metal cutting industry. And so he definitely put his money where his mouth is. And that's how he first kind of got into the idea of becoming an efficiency expert.

5:26Yeah, I think this is a certain kind of brain because I am on that spectrum a little bit and trying to weed out inefficiencies with certain things. But I'm on the side of the spectrum that is also it comes from laziness. Uh, so I'll try and do that because I'm inherently kind of lazy, I think. So I'm like, I look for ways to cut corners to still get the job done. Right. And I've had people compliment me in the old days, like on film sets, like, Hey, you know, I see what you're doing there and you're the kid I would hire twice. Whereas the guy next to you, who's just like, no man, let's just make eight trips and just hump it and do it.

6:07Right. He's like, I know he's thinks he's getting it done just the old fashioned way. He's like, but you're the guy we would hire a second time. And your response is like, well, can I go home early? Probably so. But that was always my aim. But it's interesting that, you know, I had that a little bit in my brain, but not like this guy did. Like he was obsessed with efficiencies such that he thought, and he's kind of right in some ways, that one of the biggest threats to getting something done in a productive, efficient way was slacking off in what he called systematic soldiering. And I kind of agree with that to a certain degree.

6:44Yeah. Remember in our Peter Principle episode, we talked about a corollary to that called Parkinson's law, which is like a tongue in cheek law that work expanded to fill the time allotted. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, if you're sitting there like making widgets, sorry to be cliche, but that's what I'm going with, eight or 10 hours a day, you're not going to be the most efficient you can be. you're going to be about as efficient as as ambitious as you are. Like your ambition, how far you want to go, is basically equaled in some weird ratio to the amount of efficiency that you produce at your job. Right.

7:23So if you're like, I'm happy here, I'm not going to bust my hump like that guy to go an extra half mile because I'm not going to get anything in return. So I'm just going to do my job at a pace that I find acceptable and that the people I work for find acceptable. And I mean, if you want to call that slacking off or being lazy, fine. And Frederick Taylor definitely did. But it's also just kind of like being a human being, you know? Yeah, and to be clear, because I think it seems like I might have been mischaracterized here, the film set thing, I wasn't like, let's just do the minimum. I was in a situation, in this specific incident, where I was trying to do a little extra work by getting a cart loaded rather than just making a ton of trips.

8:15and the guys and he was like no and we'll mess with getting that cart out let's just hump all this stuff back and forth right and they were like hey guys or to me hey guy and i said my name's chuck right and they said hey chuck uh you're the guy i would hire twice because you were taking the time to do it more efficiently not like hey i admire like the lazy side of you right and they appreciated your soft touch with the donkey that pulled the cart right but it was lazy and that i I didn't want to do all those trips. That's where it initially sprang from was I don't want to have to tote all that stuff eight times.

8:49Does that make sense? Yeah, I think the reason you're – man, we're really going deep on this. But I think the reason that you're feeling mischaracterized is because you're misusing the word lazy. That's not lazy. That's what they call work smarter, not harder. Yeah, but you only do that if you've got a little laziness in you. No, that's not necessarily true. I think it's just sensible. Okay, but I'm also lazy then. How's that? Okay, there you go. But they're not necessarily inextricably tied together in that instance. Okay. Anyway, I don't think what you just described qualifies as laziness. But what Frederick Taylor considered laziness, he called something called systematic soldiering, which I still can't make heads or tails of.

9:34It does not make any sense to me, does it, to you? Well, what does soldiering mean? I don't know. I mean, you go off and fight battles or you go and follow orders. I don't know. I don't know what he means. Did you look up soldiering? No, I didn't. I just accessed my brain databanks. Well, I'm going to look it up. Go ahead. We'll do a rare look. Okay, well, that's what. Serve as a soldier. Right. Or to aha. Oh, well, no, that doesn't make any sense either. Like soldiering on. Right. Persevering. Yeah. I don't that make any sense to me officially as well. It makes no sense because that was his term.

10:17Systematic soldiering. I would call it systematic leaning against something. Yeah. Right. That's what he called slacking off. And like this guy was an aristocat through and through. Right. His mother's family came over in the early 1600s, I think, to America. So like he was a wealthy, blue-blooded Quaker boy who, because his parents were like do-gooders, his mom certainly was. She was a suffragette, an abolitionist. He was raised to care about humanity, but he also didn't have that spark of compassion that it takes to care about humans individually. So he cared about creating a better society for humans, but he couldn't really help but look down on other people he considered lower than him, including immigrants.

11:04So he did notice things like you're not working as hard as you can. I'm going to see to it that you work harder. And he felt totally comfortable with filling that role. And he actually created that role for himself to fill, which is pretty remarkable, if you ask me. That's right. So he was at Midvale and he sort of started breaking down the operations of the jobs that they had there at Midvale. And he was like, you know, there are some elementary operations that happen here. So we're going to form an estimating department where we're going to sit around and do time studies, which he got from class at Phillips Exeter.

11:41And we're going to time workers doing all these little small tasks. because we're going to add that up to the whole and kind of average it out and say, hey, you should be able to do this in that amount of time and we'll adjust accordingly. We'll incentivize accordingly. And he said, and you know what else? This is now a new career. I'm going to be a consulting engineer in management. And I'm going to charge you to tell you how bad you're doing things. Yeah. Yeah. And so those management companies like KPMG and McKinsey, they would not exist ostensibly had Frederick Taylor not created that field.

12:19Like that's what he created. These huge, just mega world influencing companies came from this guy basically making up the profession. Yeah. And you know what? We should we should give a good example here, because what he was really most or not most well known for, but something he became very well known for was his work at Bethlehem Steel. And he started looking at the process of loading iron onto rail cars, pig iron, and said, all right, we need to figure out how much of this stuff is reasonable for one of these men to load onto a rail car. The average right now is 12 and a half tons a day. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to get 10 large, powerful Hungarian workers to and say, hey, load as much as you can, as fast as you can.

13:07Sixteen and a half tons is your goal. And they did that in 14 minutes, whereas 12 and a half tons was the daily rate for their average worker. So that's 71 tons in a 10 hour day. He rounded up to 75 and then said, yeah, but you know what? People get tired and they need breaks. So let's whack off 40 % of that and we'll just make we'll just call it even at 47 and a half tons per day, which is four times as much as you've usually been doing. Right. That's that's the new expectation. Yeah. And that thing about people getting tired, he called the law of heavy laboring. And from what I can tell, he made up that law that I put into scare quotes.

13:46And this is a really good example of what he did. like he was supposed to be precise in finding like ultimate efficiency but he was arbitrarily rounding up and arbitrarily coming up with 40 off based on this law that he made up and now you kind of start to get to see like behind the veil or like the the meat that's on the bones i don't know the analogy i'm looking for but uh you can pull back the curtain that's the one and see that this stuff is actually not what Frederick Taylor cracked it up to be. The Great Oz. Exactly. Not so much. Right. It wears no clothes. All right. So when this happened, some people said, I ain't doing this.

14:28They quit. They got fired. Some people tried and couldn't do it. Some people were so tired from trying to load that much or that they couldn't come back the next day. And things got really heated. He hired armed guards to walk him home at night. Taylor did because he was so worried. And then he said, all right, I'm going to create a new fake scenario. And this is something that I've seen businesses do that I hate when they create like, you know, here's our worker, Todd. And Todd, you know, and it's all just made up BS. And that's what he did with Schmidt. Here's the thing, though. So Schmidt, yes, was a fictional invention, essentially, of Taylor's making.

15:10But he went around the country giving this lecture or wrote in his books, like, as if this actually happened. About Schmidt? Yeah. It was a great movie. I really felt uncomfortable when he made a pass at the wife of the friendly couple that he met. Other than that, I thought it was a great movie. Yeah. I think at that point, that was actually just an outtake of Jack Nicholson doing his thing. Keep rolling the cameras. This is great. So like so he was he put out there that the Schmidt character was like a real deal thing, not a made up thing, not a made up anecdote to prove his point. And he actually did consult at Bethlehem Steel where Schmidt supposedly worked.

15:53But the upshot of all of it was this. There was this guy named Schmidt who is known to work very hard. and he was also very motivated by money because he was building his own house and he needed as much money as he could get to build said house. But not too bright, right? Not too bright. That's a really important point that Taylor would hammer home any chance he got. This guy was sluggish, mentally speaking, is the way that he put it. But he got through to him with a pep talk, where essentially he said, are you a high-priced man? And Schmidt was like, I don't know what you're talking about. And when he wrote about Schmidt, he like replaced his W's with V's and stuff.

16:32He was a German immigrant. And he said, well, this is what a high-priced man does. He does everything that his manager tells him to do. If your manager tells you to pick up that pig iron and take six steps and then set it down over there, you do that. If your manager tells you to sit down and rest for 90 seconds, then after 90 seconds he tells you to get up and then go grab that piece of pig iron, you do that too. with no backtalk whatsoever. That's a high-priced man. You want to be a Mr. Big Boy Pants? Exactly. And high-priced men make more money. So we'll give you not just the$1.15 an hour that you're making.

17:09We'll give you$1.85 for making this 47 and a half ton quota. And all you have to do is do what your manager tells you. And this is the other thing that I guess Frederick Taylor revolutionized in a way. He divided the workforce into two parts, managers who had the brains and did the bossing around and workers who were, according to Taylor, meant to do exactly what their managers told them. And if you put the two together, you would have the most efficient way to say like load pig iron onto a railroad car. That's right. In this anecdote that he, you know, sort of preached around as if it were real.

17:50He said, then I did this. It worked so great. Schmidt was so happy and rolling in dough. Right. I got all of his coworkers to jump aboard because I showed him what a Mr. Big Boy pants look like. And everybody wanted big boy pants. And so everybody, as long as you just do what your boss says, then you're going to make more dough. And forget the fact that I'm choosing, you know, the very strongest workers to set the standard for everyone. And then in 1911, a U.S. House committee said, yeah, but we can't just forget that because you can't just pick the strongest worker and say that's the standard for everyone.

18:29And so he got into a bit of a tit for tat in that committee meeting, I guess, with Chairman William Ballshop Wilson. And he said, you know, what about if you don't have big boy pants men on your staff and like or all big boy pants men? And he said, well, it has no place for a bird that can sing but won't. And he kind of got smacked down for that because he was just lifting lines out of books that he had written. Well, yeah. Also, William Wilson said basically like we're not dealing with singing birds. We're dealing with men here who are part of society and for whom or for whose benefit society is organized.

19:11Right. So you can't essentially you can't treat people like automatons and drones and robots. shots you have to consider them as human beings and the the lines from his book that you mentioned apparently jill a poor reported that he he did so poorly in this committee hearing that by the way if you want to ever be nervous about a committee hearing you have to go testify at go to one that's literally named after you there was this was this hearing was called the house committee to investigate Taylor, not Taylorism, Taylor and other systems of shop management. And so he actually ordered one of his underlings to go steal William Wilson's copy of his book.

19:55And I guess didn't wasn't successful and just kind of went ahead with the terrible testimony. But as we'll see, he used it to turn bad publicity into any publicity, which is good publicity. That's right. Right. The long and short of it with Bethlehem Steel, at least, was that they fired him. They quit the Taylor's and methods that he had brought in. And he said, all right, pay me one hundred thousand dollars and we'll call it even. Yeah. Which is about three and a half million bucks today. And that's probably a good time for a break. Agreed. All right. We'll come back and move on from Taylor for a moment to talk about the Gilbreaths right after this.

20:52Okay, Chuck, you mentioned that we're going to talk about the Gilbreths, so I say we do that now. We're talking about Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. And anyone who has ever read the book or seen the movie or the remake, Cheaper by the Dozen, this is the family that that movie and that book were based on. Franklin and Gilbreth were one of the more amazing, interesting couples that came out of the 20th century. Yeah, for sure. And two of their kids wrote that book in 1948. And, you know, it was fun. It's a classic for a reason. They remade it for a reason. For sure. To make money. Frank was a bricklayer in his earlier life, and he was one of these people that thought, including to but not limited cat skinning, that there was one best way to do any task.

21:45And so he was one of those guys where he was like, hey, that scaffold for laying bricks is kind of great, but what if there was a shelf on the scaffold for those bricks and mortar? You don't got to bend over and pick that stuff up. And what if you had some really low paid laborers that would stack the bricks on the frames for them positioned in the right direction so they don't even have to turn the bricks like really drilling down on these efficiencies. Yeah. And it seems like Frank kind of came up with this this interest independently of Frederick Taylor, even though he and Lillian and Taylor would essentially form kind of a cadre of cohorts, I guess.

22:23Whoa. Yeah. What a band name that is. This is like an independent thanks. These were two independent groups who eventually came together because they helped develop this field out of thin air. So what the Gilbreths did, Lillian and Frank together, they formed the Gilbreth Inc., a management consulting firm. They got really, really in the weeds about the movements it took to carry out a task. and they figured out that you could break any task down into 18 different kinds of movements, right? So you're not necessarily going to have all 18, but no matter what task you're talking about, it's going to be made up of no more than those 18 specific kind of movements.

23:07Things like searching for an object with your eye, grasping an object, reaching for it, disassembling it. And they call these things therbligs, which is their name roughly spelled backwards. Do you think when they met Taylor initially, they were just like, oh, my God, you're into efficiency and so are we. And Taylor said, I think you mean a fish. And they just like fainted. Yeah, I think they're right. They're like, you're our guy. Yeah. Thurbligs. So they were also big into Rich Hall and Sniglets, not to date myself. But, yeah, they made up a word and they said any action you can take is a therblig.

23:50And we want to get rid of as many therbligs as possible to make efficiency the most to maximize it as much as one possibly can. Yeah. And to do that. So they would use their kids. They ended up having a dozen kids, 11 of whom made it to adulthood. One of them died at age five of diphtheria, sadly. And I don't know how, but they plan to have six boys and six girls. And I think they were successful at that. No idea how they did that because we're talking about the beginning of the 20th century. It's called luck. Okay. Because there was no way to do that. And they decided to raise their kids under these principles of efficiency.

24:29But they weren't weirdo clinical types. Like this was a tight, cool family. Like the kids were participatory. Like they would have family meetings and each kid had a vote. And so they would have a family meeting and someone would put forward a motion. Like, I say we get a dog and someone would second it and then they put it to a vote. And then, you know, the eyes had it. So they ended up getting a dog they named Mr. Chairman. Like that was how they ran their their family. But they were all very focused on efficiency because they were obsessed with it, but not in a deleterious way or deleterious way.

25:05they were I guess the best way to put it is Lillian was searching for the most efficient way to do something so that you have more free time to go do happy things she said so it can increase your happiness minutes essentially so it was a really different viewpoint of the same thing compared to Frederick Taylor yeah I mean Taylor you kind of talked about a little bit early on but he did think it was a win win he was like this is great because it'll run more efficiently and, you know, it'll trickle down, essentially. They didn't call it that yet, but that's sort of the same notion that, like, it'll just trickle down to the worker, all this efficiency, and they'll get better wages and stuff will be cheaper and stuff like that.

25:47Like, management will never, ever take advantage of that and make you work harder just to increase profits. Exactly. And, of course, that's exactly what happened in every case. But I don't know, like, I'm kind of wondering about Taylor's heart and, like, what was in there, you know? Yeah, I think I explained it already. I'm sticking with my idea. I don't know. I think he's one of those guys that was so brain-obsessed on efficiency. I don't know that he had, like, I don't know if he thought that part through such that he was, like, some evil person set out to exploit a worker. No, I don't think he was evil.

26:26I don't think that he set out to exploit workers. But I think even after he saw what his invention was being used for, he was indifferent to that. And that says volumes about him. He never denounced it. He never called people out for misusing it. And he actually helped foster its misuse to exploit workers. So I think he was a bit of a misanthrope. Not evil, and that wasn't ever his intention to be evil. But when it turned kind of evil, he was like, sure, let's keep going if you guys are giving me money. I wonder if he might have been in an age where there weren't certain diagnoses available for what he, you know, may have had going on.

27:08Yeah, maybe for sure. I mean, it's possible. I think that we're barreling toward a future where every single person has a diagnosis of some sort or another. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, it'll be interesting. You mean like there's no perfect person and everyone has an issue that they're dealing with? Yeah, yeah, for sure. Sure, and I think we already know that, but we haven't come up with a label for every single one of those types of issues that people are working with. That's the difference that I'm talking about. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I don't know. I think sometimes that thing empowers people. I agree.