Why Jargon Has Prevailed

By trade, Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer, but he’s not renowned for that. Long before the Bobs in Office Space, Taylor was arguably the world’s first efficiency expert. In the late nineteenth century, he spent a great deal of time watching factory workers per­forming manual tasks. Taylor wasn’t bored, nor was he a voyeur. He was working, recording everything he saw with his stopwatch. He was on a quest to find the one best way to do each job. That information would further his ultimate goal: to improve—in fact, to maximize—economic efficiency, especially labor productivity. This became the basis for his theory of scientific management.