Showing results by author "Frederick Taylor" in All Categories

The appearance of a hastily constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse.

 The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) is a monograph published by Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), a manufacturing manager, mechanical engineer, and management consultant. This work laid out Taylor's views on the principles of scientific management, or industrial-era organization and decision theory. The term scientific management refers to coordinating the enterprise for everyone's benefit including increased wages for laborers, often referred to as Taylor's Principles, or Taylorism. 

On the morning of August 13, 1961, the residents of East Berlin found themselves cut off from family, friends, and jobs in the West by a tangle of barbed wire that ruthlessly split a city of four million in two. Within days the barbed-wire entanglement would undergo an extraordinary metamorphosis: It became an imposing 103-mile-long wall guarded by 300 watchtowers. A physical manifestation of the struggle between Soviet Communism and American capitalism that stood for nearly 30 years, the Berlin Wall was the high-risk fault line between East and West.

A hundred years ago, many theorists believed - just as they did at the beginning of our 21st century - that the world had reached a state of economic perfection, a never-before-seen human interdependence that would lead to universal growth and prosperity. Then, as now, the German mark was one of the most trusted currencies in the world. Yet the early years of the Weimar Republic in Germany witnessed the most calamitous meltdown of a developed economy in modern times.

The Principles of Scientific Management by F.W. Taylor is a tremendously important book, the essence of which has had irreversible impact on the way we think about organized labour and management today. It is a product of many years of experimentation, uncertainty, and hard work, fused with thoroughly modernist ideals of a pedantic mind. This book is a culmination of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s career as, perhaps, the most famous management consultant. It stands on the shoulders of his previous examinations of the wage system and the operational characteristics of machine tools.

In the autumn of 1938, Europe believed in the promise of peace. But only a year later, the fateful decisions of just a few men had again led Europe to a massive world war. Drawing on contemporary diaries, memoirs, and newspapers, as well as recorded interviews, 1939 is a narrative account of what the coming of the Second World War felt like to those who lived through it.

On the 75th anniversary of the Coventry bombing, acclaimed historian Frederick Taylor brilliantly details this momentous act and analyzes its impact on World War II and the moral quandaries it still engenders about the nature of warfare.