Harvard Business School

Was there a science underlying the complex world of manufacturing? Could HBS teach that science?

Shortly after Edwin Gay signed on as dean of HBS in 1908, he and the head of Harvard’s Graduate School of Applied Science, Wallace Sabine, traveled to the Philadelphia estate of Frederick W. Taylor. Taylor, an engineer by training, was the founder of the “scientific management” movement — also known as “Taylorism,” after its most prominent advocate.

Simply put, Taylor argued that manufacturers should determine scientifically what workers should be able to produce under specific circumstances. He used time-and-motion studies to break manufacturing tasks down into their component parts, and then specify productivity norms. Workers who exceeded those standards would receive bonuses; those who came up short would be penalized.

It was a highly controversial approach, opposed not only by workers, but also by shop foreman, who saw it as an assault on their own authority. In some setting, though, it worked: at the Midvale Steel Company plant, productivity doubled under Taylor’s scrutiny.

Gay had misgivings about Taylor and Taylorism, not least because Taylor was skeptical about the value of a master’s degree in business. (In fact, he thought that even an undergraduate education was detrimental in manufacturing.) Nevertheless, Gay invited Taylor to lecture at HBS — teaching the Industrial Organization course with several junior colleagues — starting in the spring of 1909. Gay apparently felt that his school couldn’t study everything, and therefore ceded the manufacturing realm to Taylor.

Taylor remained openly skeptical about the HBS experiment. “I have no doubt that a great deal of good will come from your school,” he wrote to Gay in 1913, “but I very much doubt whether most of the men who graduate from this school will ever become men capable of scientific management. Many of them may ultimately become good managers.”

In 1914, the ties to Taylor and Taylorism were cut, and the course was renamed Manufacturing. The HBS faculty had come to think of Taylor and his fellow “engineers -as-reformers” as the quintessential outsiders, whose prescriptions often led to extremely one-sided, anti-labor management systems. After the engineers were displaced from their prominent place in the first-year curriculum, labor got what one observer called “a more friendly consideration” at HBS.