Design and Engineering, As One (opens in new tab)

In the winter of 1898, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor arrived at the Bethlehem Steel Company in Pennsylvania with a stopwatch and a conviction. Taylor had been thinking for years about why industrial work was so inefficient, and he believed he had found the answer: the problem was that the people who did the work were also the people who decided how to do it. Workers brought their own habits, their own rhythms, their own judgment. All of that variation was, in Taylor’s v...