Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

INTRODUCTION 5 were as a rule not putting forth their best powers, because they had no incentive to do so. The incentive he proposed was high wages, to be offered as a reward for some definite achievement in work in a definite time. How was this reward to be computed ? He realized again that the “ fair day’s work,” so often spoken of, was an undetermined quantity, apparently impossible to determine when the two kinds of people who had to estimate it had each a strong personal bias in the matter. Could he discover in any impersonal and scientific way the actual time necessary to perform a particular job ? This would seem to have been already tried, ad nauseam, but the attempts had failed to give any satisfactory and available result in the form of an average time; mainly because when a job taking several hours was repeated, there would always be some change of conditions among the many variables—the machine, the surroundings, the tools, the supply of material, the man’s state of fatigue. These changes might and usually did invalidate the comparison between two jobs. Be- sides these, an acute observer was constantly seeing more possibilities of variation as little adjustments and rearrangements occurred to him. At this stage most people have relinquished any attempt at accurate determination, ascribing failure to the mutability of nature, human and otherwise. Mr. Taylor did not relinquish his conception of his “ best way,” his ideal; although he saw that he might never achieve it absolutely, he saw, never-