The Principles of Scientific Management

THE PRINCIPLES OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT 35 ment, or task management, with which it is to be compared. The writer hopes that the management of 11 initia- tive and incentive” will be recognized as representing the best type in ordinary use, and in fact he believes that it will be hard to persuade the average mana- ger that anything better exists in the whole field than this type. The task which the writer has before him, then, is the difficult one of trying to prove in a thoroughly convincing way that there is another type of management which is not only better but overwhelmingly better than the management of “initiative and incentive.” The universal prejudice in favor of the manage- ment of “initiative and incentive” is so strong that no mere theoretical advantages which can be pointed out will be likely to convince the average manager that any other system is better. It will be upon a series of practical illustrations of the actual working of the two systems that the writer will depend in his efforts to prove that scientific management is so greatly superior to other types. Certain elementary principles, a certain philosophy, will however be recognized as the essence of that which is being illus- trated in all of the practical examples which will be given. And the broad principles in which the scien- tific system differs from the ordinary or “rule-of- thumb” system are so simple in their nature that it seems desirable to describe them before starting with the illustrations. Under the old type of management success depends