The following appeared in the April, 1996, issue of
QUALITY PROGRESS:
DON'T THROW SCIENTIFIC
MANAGEMENT OUT WITH THE
BATHWATER
Taylor's much-maligned philosophy was a
valuable forerunner to TQM.
BY MICHAEL G. FREEMAN
The principal object of
management should be to
secure
the
maximum
prosperity for the employer,
coupled with the maximum
prosperity for each employee.
—Frederick Winslow Taylori
Although most American
managers are familiar
with the history of total
quality
management
(TQM) since World War
II, few are aware of the
powerful influence that
Frederick W. Taylor's
principles of scientific
management had on Japanese business practices
— and subsequently on
TQM — starting as far
back as 1912. TQM is not a
uniquely Japanese system;
it has strong American
underpinnings.
Indeed,
TQM might just be scien-
tific management brought
up to date.
THE BIRTH OF SCIENTIFIC
MANAGEMENT
Scientific
management
was Taylor's brainchild.
His definitive work on the
subject, THE PRINCIPLES OF
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT,
was published in 1911. It
was very controversial;
workers, and their unions,
disliked scientific management because it called
for the methodical, scientific investigation of the
elements of each job.
Through this study, management would come to
know as much about each
job as the workers, and as
a result, it could tell just
how much effort the
workers were putting
forth.
The workers feared that if
they
increased
their
productivity many of
them would lose their
jobs. Taylor countered
that less expensive goods
meant there would be
more buyers, and hence
more, not fewer, jobs.
Even though the economic
evidence was on Taylor's
side, he was not very convincing; to the workers
and their unions, it was an
emotional issue rather
than an economic one. For
its part, management
liked
the
increased
productivity that scientific
management brought, but
it did not like Taylor's insistence that it share the
productivity gains with
workers.
Taylor's approach, however, was correct: There
was a tremendous amount
of waste in industry in the
late 1800s, and he knew
that if he could increase
productivity and decrease
waste, the cost of goods
would fall and sales prices
would follow. He wrote:
"Through this lowering of
the selling price the whole
public, the buyer and user, of the joint product of
the labor and machinery
have profited by getting
what they buy cheaper.
This is the greatest interest
that the general public has
in scientific management
— that in the end they
will get more for their
money than they are now
getting — in other words,
that scientific management will in the end enable us all to live better
than we are now living.
Through scientific management, then, the manufacturer has already profited, and the general public has also profited."ii
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
IN JAPAN
At the turn of the century,
a new generation of managers — educated in Japan and abroad — was
running Japanese businesses. Thus, as the Japanese became familiar with
Western thought they
looked to the United
States for management
ideas. Yukinori Hoshino,
director of Japan's Kajima
Bank of Osaka, encountered
Taylor's
THE
PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC
MANAGEMENT during a
visit to the United States.
He was so impressed that
he obtained permission to
translate it into Japanese.
His translation, called THE
SECRET OF SAVING LOST
MOTION, was first distrib-
uted in 1912. It sold 1.5
million copies.iii
Almost immediately, dissenting views began to
appear, just as they had in
the United States. Some of
the reasons for this were
universal; for example, the
idea that scientific management was anti-worker.
Some reasons were distinctly Japanese, such as
labor problems and paternalism.iv And as the influence of the human relations movement grew in
Japan, objections to scientific management based
on social policy began to
grow. Nevertheless, scientific management spread.
The Taylor Society was
invited to organize its first
Japanese branch in 1925,
and three branches of its
successor
organization,
the Society for the Advancement of Management, still operate in Japan today.
In the 1930s, the Japanese
unions began to show a
renewed vigor; but since
their goals were much different from those of
American unions, the Japanese had an unquestionably easier time adopting
the scientific management
philosophy. The unions
were flexible about job as-
2
signments, and since Japanese managers already
had low wages and a
seemingly
permanent
surplus of labor, they did
not have the same interest
in squeezing out every
last ounce of productivity
as did U.S. managers. Because Japanese management had control over
worker training, its prerogative to decide on
work assignments and restructure to meet changing technology was readily accepted. Even today,
the idea that management
has a discretionary right
to move its work force
about without union interference is strongly entrenched in Japan. In this
context, neither management nor labor saw much
benefit in the practice of
tying wages to job performance. Thus, the interplay of union interests
and demands with those
of management, which led
to sharp job demarcation
in the United States, had
the opposite outcome in
Japan.v
By the beginning of World
War II, scientific management was well established in Japanese industry. It had been in use for
almost 30 years, and most
of Japan's younger man-
agers had known no other
system. Taylor's influence
at this time was felt
through top management
involvement,
employee
training,
workermanagement cooperation,
customer focus, and the
use of the scientific method and scientific measurement. The technical
orientation and management mind-set were now
in place for the coming
quality revolution.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
AND THE QUALITY
MOVEMENT IN JAPAN
Following World War II,
the concepts and techniques of modern quality
control were brought to
Japan from the United
States. In late 1945, the
first seminar on quality
control was held by W.G.
Magil of the Civil Information Division, General
Headquarters of the Allied Occupation Forces.
This weeklong course was
geared for managers and
engineers of the Japanese
telecommunication industries; presumably the
General Headquarters intended to improve the
quality of telecommunications in Japan, which was
indispensable to the military.vi
In 1946, a young engineer
named Homer M. Sarasohn was assigned the
task of restoring Japan's
production of radio receivers. The situation was
grave: "Sarasohn spent
much of his time finding
materials the Japanese
needed to get radio parts
into production. Soon a
trickle of miserably unreliable radios was reaching
Japan's villages."vii Two
years later, Sarasohn was
joined by Charles Protzman, an engineer from
Western Electric Company. Both were followers of
scientific
management;
they believed that their
mission would fail unless
they could teach the Japanese modern management
methods. Gen. Douglas
MacArthur agreed, and in
1949, under his direction,
Sarasohn and Protzman
wrote a textbook for the
U.S. Army of Occupation's
Civil
Communications
Section, which eventually
became known as CCS:
Industrial
Management.
Their students included
Matsushita
Electric's
Masaharu
Matsushita,
Mitsubishi
Electric's
Takeo Kato, and the eventual founders of the Sony
Corporation, Akio Morita
and Masaru Ibuka.
3
Sarasohn and Protzman's
message was threefold:
1. Every company needs a
concise, complete statement of purpose for its existence, one that provides
a well-defined target for
the idealistic efforts of
employees.
2. Companies must put
quality ahead of profit,
pursuing it rigorously
with techniques such as
statistical quality control.
3. Every employee deserves the same kind of
respect managers receive.
Good management is
democratic;
lower-level
employees need to be listened to by their bosses.
Like many of America's
best engineers at the time,
and like many Japanese
managers today, Sarasohn
and Protzman saw no
conflict between scientific
management, which carefully measures and analyzes everything within
the organization, and
democratic management,
which shows respect for
employees. They disagreed with the human relations experts who harshly criticized scientific
management
on
the
grounds that it focused on
the nuts and bolts when in
fact managers should care
foremost about people.
Sarasohn and Protzman's
presentation to Japanese
business leaders, however, was a blend of both
scientific
management
and respect for the worker.
Their message was not
lost on the Japanese: If one
has articulated a worthwhile purpose and constantly strives to create the
best possible manufacturing systems — culture, in
today's terms — human
relations problems will
take care of themselves.viii
Even though Sarasohn
and Protzman left Japan
at the end of the occupation in 1950, the Japan
Federation of Employers
Associations continued to
use their manual until
1973.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
BECOMES TQM
Taylor understood the
role of inspection in maintaining quality. He pioneered the practice of inspecting the first pieces of
each lot and performing
inspections at the subassembly level, rather than
allowing
a
defective
product to reach the end
of the line before being
detected. By 1929, The
Taylor
Society
had
grasped the concept of
variance and the use of inspection findings in analysis, but the detection of
trends eluded it: "The reason for inspection which
is peculiar to scientific
management is that it
serves as a device for the
maintenance of, or interpretation of reasons for,
variation from the definite
standards which have
been established. … If scientific management is a
management of precision
made possible by the substitution of constants for
variables,
then
the
maintenance of the constants is essential. Inspection
promotes
this
maintenance
of
conix
stants."
In the latter half of the
1920s, Walter A. Shewhart
of Bell Telephone Laboratories developed a theory
of statistical quality controls. He analyzed many
different processes and
concluded that all manufacturing processes display variation. He asserted that, while assignable
causes could be economically discovered and removed, the same could
not be done with random
causes without making
4
basic changes in the process.
DEMING'S CONTRIBUTION
W. Edwards Deming's
unique contribution to the
quality field was introducing Shewhart's work —
the concept of statistical
process control — to all
levels of Japanese industry. In 1950, Deming accepted an invitation from
the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers
(JUSE) to visit Japan. He
lectured to top managers
at eight-day quality control courses and seminars
in several Japanese cities.
His lectures at these seminars helped the participants understand the importance of statistical
quality control in manufacturing industries.
Later, Deming was invited
to speak to the presidents
of 21 of Japan's leading
industrial organizations.
His message was clear:
The consumer is the most
important part of the production line. "If you can
build a quality product,
the world will beat a path
to your door," Deming
said. "I told them they
would capture markets
the world over within five
years. They beat that pre-
diction. Within four years,
buyers all over the world
were screaming for Japanese products."x On later
trips Deming saw the
fruits of his efforts, as the
use of control charts and
the statistical process
blossomed
throughout
Japanese industry.
In 1951, the Japanese established the Deming
prize for quality in appreciation of what Deming
had done for them. The
money to pay for the prizes was donated by Deming himself, from the proceeds of his lecture transcripts. Competition for
the individual and corporate prizes is still intense
to the present day.
With the marriage of scientific management's carefully determined manufacturing processes, modern
machine
tools,
Shewhart's statistical process control, and Deming's
quest for quality in manufacturing, the technical
side of TQM was now in
place. All that remained
was the human element.
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
In 1954, quality control
expert J. M. Juran arrived
in Japan to present a series
of lectures. His focus was
on a newer orientation to
quality control, with the
emphasis that it must be
an integral part of the
management function and
practiced throughout the
organization. This meant
teaching quality control to
middle management. Juran's ideas spread rapidly
in major firms, with the
Japanese adding one important innovation: Every
person in the organizational hierarchy, from top
management to shop-floor
employees, would be exposed to statistical quality
control, and all workers
would join study groups
to upgrade existing practices.xi
This was not the first time
the Japanese had heard
about cooperation between workers and management and proper training, but it was the first
time they had dealt with
quality. Scientific management included provisions for employee suggestions and continuous
improvement, but the
Japanese took Taylor's
concept to a uniquely
higher level with the quality circle. Since the Japanese unions already accepted
management's
right to assign work, the
formation of quality cir-
5
cles faced no union opposition.
The Japanese recognized
the importance of frontline workers to the progress of companywide
quality control; without
the daily efforts of those
workers,
they
knew,
product quality could not
be achieved. So, to train
workers, a 13-week series,
"QC for the First-Line Supervisors," was broadcast
via shortwave radio from
October to December
1956. The series continued
to be broadcast by the Japan Broadcasting Company until 1962. During the
first year, some 100,000
transcripts of the radio
broadcast were sold at
newsstands. In 1959, a
weekly television series
on quality control was initiated, and QC Text for
Foremen, edited by Kaoru
Ishikawa, was published
by JUSE in 1960; 200,000
copies were sold before
the end of 1967. This education and training of supervisors and frontline
workers, carried out so
enthusiastically,
helped
pave the way for the quality circle movement. In
May 1962, the first quality
circle was registered at the
QC Circle Headquarters
of JUSE in Tokyo.xii With
the advent of quality circles, the human side of
TQM was finally in place.
Through scientific management, the Japanese had
developed a sound production
system.
Shewhart's statistical process control techniques
gave them the ability to
closely monitor the production process. Quality
circles
provided
the
mechanism to make rapid
changes when things went
wrong, and the means to
make continuous improvements when things
were running well. The
system was further enhanced by union flexibility and employees who
supported their companies' goals.
AND TODAY...
There are many different
viewpoints regarding the
effect of scientific management on TQM. Some
are very positive, crediting scientific management
with
nearly
singlehandedly turning around
Japan's
manufacturing
system. Shigeo Shingo,
one of the Toyota system
inventors, studied Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management in 1931
and was so impressed that
he devoted his life to the
practice.xiii Naomi Yamaki, a consultant for
Mitsubishi Space Software
Company in Tokyo, said,
"Scientific
management
has revolutionized the
Japanese
management
and industrial system. We
used to make products
that the world thought
were cheap but bad. Now
they consider our products cheap but good. Unions welcome the growth
in productivity and quality — it benefits us all."xiv
Other
commentators
claim that there are no
lasting effects from scientific management. Ishikawa, an acknowledged
leader in the Japanese
quality control movement,
has stated, "The Taylor
method is one of management by specialists. It
suggests that specialists
and engineers formulate
technical standards and
work standards. All the
workers have to do is
simply do what they are
told to do and follow the
standards set for them,
This method was probably a viable method 50
years ago, but it is certainly not applicable to today's Japan."xv
Finally, there are those
who recognize that scien-
6
tific management is still
making a contribution to
the Japanese system, but
also give credit to some of
the systems that have
come since. One such
commentator is Kaichiro
Nishino, an adviser to the
Shibaura
Engineering
Works. In an article in
Management Japan, he
wrote: "To attain the improvement of productivity, the management has to
count on the positive cooperation of both workers
and unions. When we
commenced the study of
the rudiments of management, priority was
given to the machine and
productivity was improved by submitting the
workers to mechanical
control. Nowadays such a
system no longer works.
The unions are getting increasingly stronger, and
when top priority is given
to the human being, it is
absolutely necessary to
change
radically
the
method of work. Thus, we
think that the fundamental problem is how to introduce the tradeoff relation between scientific
management and human
relations in the management of business. I think
the so-called Japanese
management style has
succeeded in attaining a
well-balanced tradeoff."xvi
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
STILL WORKS
If the proof is in the pudding, consider New United Motor Manufacturing
Inc, (NUMMI) in Fremont,
CA, a joint venture between General Motors
and Toyota. Paul Adler of
the University of Southern
California School of Business Administration had
this to say after a two-year
study of the plant:
"[NUMMI] has succeeded
in employing an innovative form of Taylor's timeand-motion regimentation
on the factory floor not
only to create world-class
productivity and quality
but also to increase worker motivation and satisfaction.
What's
more,
NUMMI's intensely Taylorist procedures appear
to encourage rather than
discourage organizational
learning and, therefore,
continuous improvement.
... Yet by far the most
striking advantage of
standardized work is that
it gives continuous improvement a specific base
to build on. As one manager put it, 'You can't improve a process you don't
understand.' In this case,
standardization is the essential precondition for
learning. … The difference
between traditional Taylorism and the learningoriented NUMMI version
resembles the difference
between computer software designed to be 'idiotproof' and the kinds of
computer systems that are
meant to leverage and enhance their users' capabilities. ... The idiot-proof system may be easy to use,
but it is also static and
boring. Leveraging systems make demands on
the operator. They take
time to learn and require
thought and skill to use,
but they are immensely
flexible, responsive, and
satisfying once mastered.
... Taylorist time-andmotion discipline and
formal bureaucratic structures are essential for efficiency and quality in routine operations. But these
principles of organizational design need not
lead to rigidity and alienation. NUMMI points the
way beyond Taylor-asvillain to the design of a
truly
learning-oriented
bureaucracy."xvii
Frederick W. Taylor, Scientific
Management: Comprising Shop
Management, The Principles of
Scientific Management, Testimony
Before the Special House Commiti
7
tee (New York. NY: Harper &
Brothers, 1947). Shop Management was originally written in
1903, Principles was written in
1911, and the testimony was
given in 1912.
ii Ibid.
iii R.G. Greenwood and R.H.
Ross, "Early American Influence on Japanese Management
Philosophy: The Scientific
Management Movement in Japan:" in S.M. Lee and G.
Schwendiman, editors, Management by Japanese Systems
(New York, NY: Praeger, 1982),
pp. 43-54.
iv
K. Okuda, comment made at
15th International Conference
on Business History, Fuji, Japan, 1988, in Japanese Management in Historical Perspective:
Proceedings of the Fuji Conference
(Tokyo, Japan: University of
Tokyo Press, 1989), pp.192-196.
v
Robert E. Cole, Work Mobility
and Participation: A Comparative.
Study of American and Japanese
Industry (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979).
vi
J. M. Juran, and Frank M.
Gryna, editors, Juran's Quality
Control Handbook, 4th edition
(New York, NY: McGraw-Hill,
1988).
vii
Robert Chapman Wood, "A
Lesson Learned and a Lesson
Forgotten" Forbes, February 6,
1989, pp. 70-78.
viii
Ibid.
ix
The Taylor Society, Scientific
Management in American Industry (Easton, PA: Hive Publishing Company, 1972).
x
Mary Walton, The Deming
Management Method (New York,
NY: Dodd, 1986).
xi
Cole, Work Mobility and Participation: A Comparative Study of
American and Japanese Industry.
xii
Juran and Gryna, Juran's
Quality Control Handbook.
xiii
J. R. Stewart, "The Work Ethic, Luddites and Taylorism in
Japanese Management Literature," IM (Industrial Management), Nov.-Dec. 1992, pp. 2326.
xiv
R. P. Hagen, "Taylor's Challenge to Management: Is There
a Better Way?" SAM Advanced
Management Journal, Vol. 53,
Spring 1988, pp. 45-48.
xv
Stewart, "The Work Ethic,
Luddites, and Taylorism in
Japanese Management Literature."
xvi
Kaichiro Nishino, "Why
Productivity of Japanese Industry Is High," Management Japan.
Vol.16, Spring 1983, pp.19-25.
xvii
Paul S. Adler, "Time-andMotion Regained" Harvard
Business Review, Vol.71, January-February 1993, pp. 97-108.
8