some slight increase in the test; but it required a constant urging upon our part to focus the attention of the men upon this three minute time of low pressure....  We realized finally that in order to get the results we were after, it was necessary for us to produce a desire upon the part of our men to do this work in the proper way ... so we designed an instrument which would give us a record of the time lost between pressing operations, also the number of minutes the low pressure was kept on.  It took us something over a year to perfect this machine, but after it was finally perfected and a record of the operations made, we found that the men actually were operating at an average efficiency of 42 per cent, and our moisture test was running about 54 per cent.  Our next step was to post a daily record of the relative standing of the men in the machine room, putting the men who had the best record at the top of the list, in the order of their weekly average efficiencies. (The efficiency of low pressure, which proved to be the most important factor, was computed by calling three minutes of low pressure 100 per cent and two minutes either way 0 per cent.) As a result of simply posting this record our efficiencies rose to over 60 per cent and our moisture test increased a little less than 1 per cent.  Some of the best and most skilled men had an efficiency of over 80 per cent, but quite a large percentage of them were down below 50 per cent.  We therefore decided that it was necessary to have the foreman give more detailed information to the men as to what the machine meant and how their efficiencies were obtained and to put the instrument which did the recording into a glass case in the machine room where all the men could see it.  Each foreman took a portion of the chart and one of the celluloid scales by which, we obtained the efficiencies and explained in detail to each one of the men how their records were calculated.  As a result of this, our efficiency rose from 60 per cent to 80 per cent in less than four weeks, and it has remained at 80 per cent ever since—­(ever since being over two years)—­enabling us to get a moisture of over 56 per cent."[A]

[Footnote A:  Bulletin of the Taylor Society—­March, 1917.]

This was accomplished, Mr. Wolf told them, without resorting to piece work or bonus or any of the special methods of payments, their men being hired by the day throughout the entire plant.  Mr. Wolf accomplished the result by giving meaning to a meaningless task, by letting the men see for themselves how they arrived at results, letting them see the different processes of getting results and knowing on their own account which were the most valuable.

There may be other managers who appreciate the value of letting men in on the experimental effort of getting results but it is not the practice to do so and it is opposed to the idea of transferring the responsibility from the workshop to the manager’s office or laboratory.  Because of this practice the educational value of establishing standards of workmanship is lost so far as the workers are concerned.  Mr. Wolf’s criticism of orthodox scientific management and his conclusions are illuminating; they are indeed revolutionary in nature as they come from a manager of a successful industrial enterprise: