Efficiency Methods
An Introduction to Scientific Management

CHAPTER II MANAGEMENT: A PRELIMINARY DISCUSSION What is “ management ” ? When a word is as much over-used as this one now bids fair to be, a new definition may be helpful. Many attempts to define it could be quoted. American writers on the subject are nothing if not explicit, and the mist of words that results is bewildering to the British manager, who prefers doing his work to explaining what he thinks he is doing to the world at large. Nevertheless, the modern conceptions of manage- ment may give him occasion for thought. A writer in the American Journal of Political Economy recently defined it as the “ science of human labour ” (with some digression as to its being also an art and a philosophy). Mr. Taylor’s power of admirably direct expression is shown in “ the art of knowing exactly what is to be done, and the best and cheapest way of doing it.” Now the fault charged by reformers on the old ways of managing, that have evolved gradually as a business grew larger, is that the employer or manager had finally come to hiring people who were supposed to know their job already—what was to be done and the best way of doing it. The assumption was that nearly all the 16