Volume 44, Number 18 · November 20, 1997
Speedy Fred's Revolution
By Sean Wilentz
The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency
by Robert Kanigel
Viking, 675 pp., $34.95
Eighty-two years after his death in 1915, Frederick Winslow Taylor, the industrial engineer whose invention of 'scientific management' promised to revolutionize American industry, is largely forgotten. Celebrated during his lifetime for his dramatic schemes to improve efficiency and increase productivity, Taylor was once linked with Thomas Edison and Henry Ford as one of the great American industrial innovators. But today, even among the few who remember his work, it is difficult to find anyone who would endorse it.
Review, 5676 words
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