Task 1. Read the text “Frederick Taylor” and translate it.

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 452.

UNIT 1

EXTENDED READING

Task 2. Find answers to the following questions in the text and write them down:

4. Is Taylor generally recognised as “the father of scientific management”?

5. Did he have good life experience to see the greatest possibilities for improving the quality of management?

6. What made Taylor prosperous?

7. When was his well-known work published?

8. Why were most of congressmen unfriendly to Taylor's ideas?

9. What are Taylor's principles?

FREDERICK TAYLOR

(1856– 1912)

Frederick Winslow Taylor stopped going to college and started out as a trainee patternmaker and machinist in 1875, joined the Midvale Street Company in Philadelphia as a worker in 1878 and rose to the position of chief engineer after getting a degree in engineering through evening study. He invented high-speed steel-cutting tools and spent most of his life as a consulting engineer. Taylor is generally recognised as “the father of scientific management”. Perhaps no other person has had a greater impact on the early development of management. His knowledge and practice as a trainee, a common employee, a foreman, a master mechanic and then the chief engineer of a steel company gave Taylor more than enough opportunity to know personally the problems and attitudes of workers and to see the greatest possibilities for improving the quality of management.

Taylor's patents for high-speed steel-cutting tools and other inventions, as well as his early engineering consulting work, made him so prosperous that he retired from working for payment in 1901, at the age of 45 and spent the remaining 14 years of his life as a not paid advisor and lecturer to advance his ideas on scientific management.

Taylor's most important concern throughout most of his life was to enlarge efficiency in production, not only to minor costs and increased profits but also to make possible enlarged pay for workers through their higher productivity. He supposed that the use of scientific methods, rather than custom and rule of thumb, could yield productivity without the expenses of more human energy of effort.

His well-known work entitled “Principles of Scientific Management” was published in 1911. But one of the best expositions of his philosophy of management can be found in his testimony before a committee of the House of Representatives; he was forced to defend his ideas before a group of congressmen, most of whom were unfriendly because they thought, along with labour leaders, that Taylor's ideas would lead to overworking and displacing workers.

Taylor's principles are as following:

· Changing rules of thumb with science (organised knowledge).

· Attaining harmony in group activity, rather than disagreement.

· Achieving teamwork of human beings, rather than chaotic individualism.

· Working for highest output, rather than limited output.

· Developing all workers to the highest degree possible for their own and their company's highest success.