“One of the hardest-to-down myths about the evolution of mass production at Ford is one which credits much of the accomplishment to 'scientific management.' No one at Ford—not Mr. Ford, Couzens, Flanders, Wills, Pete Martin, nor I—was acquainted with the theories of the 'father of scientific management,' Frederick W. Taylor. Years later I ran across a quotation from a two-volume book about Taylor by Frank Barkley Copley, who reports a visit Taylor made to Detroit late in 1914, nearly a year after the moving assembly line had been installed at our Highland Park plant. Taylor expressed surprise to find that Detroit industrialists 'had undertaken to install the principles of scientific management without the aid of experts.' To my mind this unconscious admission by an expert is expert testimony on the futility of too great reliance on experts and should forever dispose of the legend that Taylor's ideas had any influence at Ford.”

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 41

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "One of the hardest-to-down myths about the evolution of mass production at Ford is one which credits much of the accomp…" by Charles E. Sorensen?

Charles E. Sorensen10

American businessman 1881–1968

Related quotes

“Frederick W. Taylor was the first man in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study. On Taylor's 'scientific management' rests, above all, the tremendous surge of affluence in the last seventy-five years which has lifted the working masses in the developed countries well above any level recorded before, even for the well-to-do. Taylor, though the Isaac Newton (or perhaps the Archimedes) of the science of work, laid only first foundations, however. Not much has been added to them since – even though he has been dead all of sixty years.”

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) American business consultant

Source: 1960s - 1980s, MANAGEMENT: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices (1973), Part 1, p. 181

“A number of engineers became so-called disciples of Frederick W. Taylor, even though he had passed on to his reward in 1915. A considerable number of engineers took up the so-called scientific management of Frederick Taylor and further embroidered it and publicized themselves as efficiency engineers and management consultants. Henry L. Gantt had been Taylor's assistant at the Midvale Steel and the Bethlehem Steel Company. Gant, were among the many prominent advocates of Taylor's efficiency system with some variations.
Gant, Barth and others tried to start an organization, ' 'The New Machine." ' 'The New Machine" never got off the ground; all of them wrote articles and delivered papers in the engineering societies and management conferences. But their chief purpose was in creating a national image so they could sell their services to large-scale private enterprise as scientific managers and efficiency engineers who would be able to install the system that could extract more productivity from the American worker.”

Howard Scott (1890–1970) American engineer

Source: History and Purpose of Technocracy, 1965, p. 7

“The Chairman: Mr. Taylor, do you believe that any system of scientific management induced by a desire for greater profits would revolutionize the minds of the employers to such an extent that they would immediately, voluntarily and generally enforce the golden rule.?
Mr. Taylor: If they had any sense, they would.”

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915) American mechanical engineer and tennis player

Source: Testimony of Frederick W. Taylor... 1912, p. 148 ; Cited in: Frank Barkley Copley. Frederick W. Taylor, father of scientific management https://archive.org/stream/frederickwtaylor01copl#page/n5/mode/2up. Published 1923. p. ii.

“A better name for scientific management is "measured functional management." It is not sufficient to call it " labor saving 'management " for it deals with more than labor and labor saving. It is a way for obtaining methods of least waste. It not only saves useless labor, but it improves labor conditions; improves quality of product; prolongs the period of the worker's productivity; conserves, teaches and transfers skill and experience. The committee have caused the Society and the world to recognize at last the importance of the feature of the transference of skill, but they apparently still lack appreciation of the even greater feature of the recording and transference of experience of Mr. Taylor's measured functional management and of micro-motion study. Mr. Taylor's system is best described in his writings entitled A Piece Kate System, Shop Management, and On the Art of Cutting Metals, published by the Society, and Principles of Scientific Management, published by Harper & Brothers.”

Frank Bunker Gilbreth, Sr. (1868–1924) American industrial engineer

Source: The present state of art of industrial management, 1913, p. 1224

“One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

“Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved.”

Ivor Grattan-Guinness (1941–2014) Historian of mathematics and logic

Source: Companion encyclopedia of the history and philosophy of the mathematical sciences (2003), p. 841.

“Without titles and tier of officials how could one build an organization? When Flanders resigned as production manager taking with him his assistant Walborn, to work for a newly formed company, Henry Ford called Ed Martin and me to his office. "Ed and Charlie," he said, "Flanders and Walborn are leaving, and I want you to take their places. You Ed, will be plant superintendent and you Charlie, will be assistant superintendent. Just go out there and run the plant. I know you can do it. But there's one thing I want to add: work together as one. I don't ever want to hear that you can't work together. And don't worry about titles."”

Charles E. Sorensen (1881–1968) American businessman

Source: My Forty Years with Ford, 1956, p. 49-50

“The transformation of the automobile market was essentially complete in 1929. If Mr. Ford, in that pivotal year in the modern economy, still held stubbornly to his old concept in his new Model A, he was counterbalanced by Mr. Chrysler, who had come up from nowhere with tremendous vitality and with a market policy similar to General Motors'. The fact that Mr. Ford built nearly two million of the five million U. S.-produced cars and trucks sold that year was only incidental from the long-term point of view. it was a splurge, not the sign of a trend.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 169

“Dhoni is one of the finest leaders in the game in the last 30 years and is at par with the likes Imran Khan, Mark Taylor and Arjun Ranatunga.”

MS Dhoni (1981) Indian cricket player

Ian Chappell https://www.scoopwhoop.com/sports/dhoni-quotes/

“Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution…
What Taylor did was not to invent something quite new, but to synthesise and present as a reasonably coherent whole ideas which had been germinating and gathering force in Great Britain and the United States throughout the nineteenth century. He gave to a disconnected series of initiatives and experiments a philosophy and a title; complete unity was not within his scope… It was left to others to extend his philosophy to other functions and especially to Henri Fayol, a Frenchman, to develop logical principles for the administration of a large-scale undertaking as a whole.
It detracts nothing from Taylor's greatness to see him thus as a man who focussed his thought of the preceding age, carried that thought forward with a group of friends and colleagues whose united contribution was so outstanding as to constitute a "golden age" of management in the United States and laid the intellectual foundations on which all subsequent work in Great Britain and many other countries has been based. But it is impossible to understand Taylor's achievement or the significance of Scientific Management for our society, unless his individual work is seen against the background of this larger whole of which it is only a part.”

Lyndall Urwick (1891–1983) British management consultant

Vol I. p. 16-17; as cited in: Harry Arthur Hopf. Historical perspectives in management https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009425985. Ossining, N.Y., 1947. p. 4-5 <br class="br">1940s, The Making Of Scientific Management, 1945

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Charles E. Sorensen10

Related quotes

Related topics