Harrington Emerson Quotes

Harrington Emerson was an American efficiency engineer and business theorist, who founded the management consultancy firm Emerson Institute in New York City in 1900. Known for his pioneering contributions to scientific management, Emerson may have done more than anyone else to popularize the topic: his public testimony in 1910 to the Interstate Commerce Commission that the railroads could save $1,000,000 a day started a nationwide interest in the subject of "efficiency". Wikipedia  

✵ 2. August 1853 – 2. September 1931
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Harrington Emerson: 9   quotes 1   like

Famous Harrington Emerson Quotes

“Twelve Principles of Efficiency”

The twelve principles of efficiency (1912)

“The schedule is a moral contract or agreement with the men as to a particular machine operation, rate of wages and time. Any change in men [etc. ] calls for a new schedule.”

Harrington Emerson, as cited in: Horace Bookwalter Drury (1918) Scientific Management: A History and Criticism http://archive.org/stream/scientificmanag00druruoft#page/140/mode/2up. p. 142

“It is psychology, not soil or climate, that enables a man to raise five times as many potatoes per acre as the average in his own state.”

Source: The twelve principles of efficiency (1912), p. 107 ; cited in: Hugo Münsterberg. Psychology and Industrial Efficiency, 1913, p. 52

“We have not put our trust in Kings; let us not put it in natural resources, but grasp the truth that exhaustless wealth lies in the latent and as yet undeveloped capacities of individuals, of corporations, of States.”

Source: Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages, p. 164; ; Cited in: Morgen Witzel (2003) Fifty Key Figures in Management. p. 80

“The individual effort method of increasing the reward of the wage-earner includes all that is best in other methods, and attempts to exclude all that is objectionable. Its good points are summed up as follows:
# The standard time set is reasonable and one that can be reached without extraordinary effort, is in fact such time as a good foreman would demand.
# An extra reward of one-fifth of the regular wages for the operation is given to whoever makes standard time.
# Extra compensation above the hourly rate is paid even if standard time is not reached, although this extra compensation diminishes in percentage above standard time-and-a-half.
# If longer than time-and-a-half is taken, the regulai day rate is paid. Of this, the wage-earner is also sure.
# Standard time is carefully determined by observation and experiment, and is only changed when conditions change.
# The arrangement is one of mutual benefit to both parties — of increased earning to the worker, of increased saving to the employer.
# The employer loses more than the wage-earner if schedules do not encourage co-operation.
# The wage-earner, working on a schedule, becomes in a large degree his own foreman.
# The wage-earner determines his own earning power, and by co-operating to cut out wastes increases his own value.”

Harrison Emerson, " Shop betterment and the individual effort method of profit-sharing http://archive.org/stream/americanengineer80newy#page/64/mode/1up" in: International Railway Journal Vol. 13. p. 61. 1905; Partly cited in Drury (1918, p. 141)

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