By all accounts, Henry Noll was a good worker.

He would walk home after a 10-hour day at a brisk pace “about as fresh as he was when he came trotting down to work in the morning.” He was frugal -- one of his coworkers said, “A penny looks about the size of a cart wheel to him” -- saving enough of the $1.15 per day he earned in 1899 to buy a small plot of land. Before and after his shift at Bethlehem Iron Company in Pennsylvania, he worked on constructing the walls of a small one-and-a-half-story clapboard house.

He was not a large man, only 135 pounds, but he was strong and athletic. He had worked three years at Bethlehem when he was discovered and eventually made famous by Frederick Winslow Taylor.

Taylor was a proponent of what he called “scientific management.” Ironically, he was one of history’s worst managers. By not only ignoring the views of workers like Noll, but even mocking their worthiness to have an opinion about their own efforts, Taylor taught -- by contrast -- the importance of the Seventh Element of Great Managing. The element is measured by the statement “At work, my opinions seem to count.”

Although the son of a wealthy family, Taylor apprenticed in a machine shop. He was endlessly experimenting with improving processes, particularly with lathes, metallurgy, and the tools used to cut the metal. Taylor was obsessed with output -- how to help employees “do their work in the best way and in the quickest time.” In 1899, he turned his attention to the problem of 80,000 tons of “pig iron” sitting in a yard east of the iron mill and tried to apply to human productivity the scientific approach he previously used on mechanical workings.

Each 92-pound block or “pig” of iron had to be lifted, carried across wooden planks to the railcar, and handed to another man stacking them in place. The usual rate of loading was 12½ tons per man in a 10-hour day. Taylor estimated that a “first-class” worker could load 45 tons per day.

Why would anyone work at a pace twice to three times what laborers had averaged? In his utopian view, Taylor assumed it was simply a matter of higher pay for harder work and persuading workers to leave the thinking to a group of methodical overseers using Taylor’s methods. “The development of a science (of managing tasks) involves the establishment of many rules, laws, and formulae which replace the judgment of the individual workman and which can be effectively used only after having been systematically recorded, indexed, etc.,” he wrote.

Such grueling work

Right from the beginning, there were problems. When paid by the day, workers made about $1.15. A worker could earn $1.69 if he hit the supposedly attainable 45-ton mark, but that would mean lifting almost 1,000 pigs during his shift, almost 100 an hour. Ten men who agreed to try piecework changed their minds and went back to the day-rate crew. Taylor saw to it they were fired. Seven more men were recruited. Only five reported for work. One of them was Henry Noll.

The five men averaged 32 tons each that day, but two more dropped out. Noll’s coworkers moved between 35 and 40 tons each. Noll did 45¾, earning $1.71. Very soon, only Noll remained. Noll became Taylor’s poster child. The efficiency expert claimed that his worker wasn’t unusual -- that many workers who weren’t “soldiering” or failing to follow orders could equal his output. But the engineer certainly didn’t think much of his ideal worker’s intellect, as shown by Taylor’s recollection of his directions to Noll on how he could earn higher pay.

“If you are a high-priced man,” Taylor said, “you will do exactly as this man tells you tomorrow, from morning ‘til night. When he tells you to pick up a pig and walk, you pick it up and you walk, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you sit down. You do that right straight through the day. And what’s more, no back talk. Now, a high-priced man does just what he’s told to do, and no back talk. Do you understand that?”

Copyright Ó 2007 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.  Visit The Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/

Article from The Gallup Management Journal