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Frederick Winslow Taylor was no saint. Organized labor reviled him as the ruthless architect of industrial slavery. Management hailed him as an industrial messiah while simultaneously viewing him as an eccentric and a radical. Taylor's own friends characterized him as tactless, pugnacious, and combative.
Yet despite all his faults, "when it comes to the areas of modern life he touched, Taylor is the gold standard against which all else must be compared, the natural benchmark."
In The One Best Way, Robert Kanigel has written a definitive and illuminating biography of Taylor. Kanigel paints a multifaceted portrait of a highly complex man and depicts him with all his faults and virtues. In doing so, he successfully portrays the humanity of an individual so frequently reduced to a caricature of the devil incarnate. At the age of fifteen, Kanigel first encountered Taylor while reading John Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy. The third volume of that trilogy, Big Money, contains an eight page portrait of Taylor entitled the "American Plan." Describing Taylor in less than flattering terms, Dos Passos states: "He couldn't stand to see an idle lathe or an idle man. Production went to his head and thrilled his sleepless nerves like liquor or women on a Saturday night." This description struck a deep chord within Kanigel who never forgot it or its subject.
Today the passage of time has dimmed the public's memory of Frederick Taylor. Mention his name outside of business or engineering circles and at best he is vaguely recalled as the "father of scientific management" or as the engineer who incessantly searched for the one best way of performing a task. Taylor fares little better with modern intellectuals and business practitioners, among whom Taylorism has fallen into disfavor. Despite his faded memory, Taylor nonetheless had a pervasive and extraordinary influence on the modern world.
Peter Drucker once described Taylor as perhaps "the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers." Frederick Taylor died over eighty years ago, yet his theories still exert enormous influence in...