Frederick Winslow Taylor

Efficiency and best practice. Taylor, a Philadelphia engineer, timed workers with a stopwatch and published The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911, arguing that every task had one best way that managers should design and workers should follow. Efficiency, standard procedures and time-and-motion all trace to him. His famous pig-iron study was later shown to be exaggerated, and unions attacked his methods for deskilling and speeding up work.