Henri Fayol

Henri Fayol (Istanbul, 29 July 1841 – Paris, 19 November 1925) was a French mining engineer and director of mines who developed a general theory of business administration that is often called Fayolism.

 He and his colleagues developed this theory independently of scientific management but roughly contemporaneously. 

Like his contemporary, Frederick Winslow Taylor, he is widely acknowledged as a founder of modern management methods.








Fayol's work became more generally known with the 1949 publication of General and industrial administration, the English translation of the 1916 article "Administration industrielle et générale". In this work Fayol presented his theory of management, known as Fayolism. Before that Fayol had written several articles on mining engineering, starting in the 1870s, and some preliminary papers on administration.

Henry Laurence Gantt

Henry Laurence Gantt (May 20, 1861 – November 23, 1919) was an American mechanical engineer and management consultant who is best known for developing the Gantt chart in the 1910s.


Gantt charts were employed on major infrastructure projects including the Hoover Dam and Interstate highway system and continue to be an important tool in project management and programme management.






Henry Gantt's legacy to project management is the following:

• The Gantt chart: Still accepted as an important management tool today, it provides a graphic schedule for the planning and controlling of work, and recording progress towards stages of a project. The chart has a modern variation, Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT).
• Industrial Efficiency: Industrial efficiency can only be produced by the application of scientific analysis to all aspects of the work in progress. The industrial management role is to improve the system by eliminating chance and accidents.
• The Task And Bonus System: He linked the bonus paid to managers to how well they taught their employees to improve performance.
• The social responsibility of business: He believed that businesses have obligations to the welfare of the society in which they operate.

Gantt chart complete information: http://www.gantt.com/

Frederick Winslow Taylor

Frederick Winslow Taylor, was born in 1856, in America, is a mechanical engineer who relentlessly pursued to improve industrial efficiency. He is known as the father of scientific management.

Scientific Management

Workmen thought that it is for their best interests to go slow instead of to go fast because they believed that if they were to double their output in the coming year, half of them would be out of a job before the year was out. Taylor asserted that this is a fallacious view. According to him the truth is: “even though that labor-saving device may turn out ten, twenty, thirty times that output that was originally turned out by men in that trade, the result has universally been to make work for more men in that trade, not work for less men.” He justified his view with the efficiency increase in cotton industry. In Manchester, in 1840, there were 5,000 weavers and at the time of Taylor it was 265.000. He asked the question: “has the introduction of labor-saving machinery (in cotton industry in Manchester), which has multiplied the output per man by tenfold, thrown men out of work?“.

Mental Revolution

Since he knew the reasons of workmen’s fallacious view (if they work more efficiently, some of them will lose their job), he did not blame those workmen. Instead, he tried to explain why the opposite was true. He listed three reasons for the inefficiency:

1. Deceptive belief that a material increase in the output of each man or each machine in the trade would throw people out of work.
2. Defective management systems, which made it necessary for each workman to soldier (purposefully operating well below their capacity), to protect his own best interests
3. Inefficient rule of thumb methods, which were almost universal in all trades, which cost much wasted effort

Taylor succeeded to increase efficiency by applying the principles of scientific management. He asserted that “scientific management does not exist and cannot exist until there has been a complete mental revolution on the part of the workmen working under it, as to their duties toward themselves and toward their employees, and a complete mental revolution in the outlook for employers, toward their duties, toward themselves and towar their workmen.”

Four Principles of Scientific Management:

Taylor explained the Principles of Scientific Management in his book which was published in 1911:

1. Replace rule of thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
2. Scientifically select and then train, teach, and develop the workman, whereas in the past the employee (or workmen) chose his own work and trained himself as best he could.
3. Provide “Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker’s discrete task”
4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.