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The term ‘scientific management’ originated with Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), a former Pennsylvanian steelworker turned engineering consultant. Taylor believed that losses to industry through inefficiency could be remedied through the application of systematic management, and that ‘the best management is a true science, relying upon clearly defined laws, rules and principles’. He proposed that rather than leaving it up to skilled workers to plan and execute jobs in manufacturing, managers should analyse every task to reduce it to the minimum number of essential movements – the ‘one best way’, as he termed it, of completing the task. They should then allocate tasks to specialised workers and give them appropriate incentives to perform them at a rate that maximised their efficiency.

Taylor was widely attacked by those who saw his methods as inhumane, and he died a disappointed man. But during the First World War, when labour was short and productivity at a premium, a new generation of disciples picked up and developed his ideas. Factories were invaded by eager young men with clipboards and stopwatches, carrying out the ‘time and motion’ studies that were an essential feature of Taylorism.

In the years following the war, the watchword of efficiency began to be heard in offices as well as factories. The business office as we know it today was itself a creation of the late nineteenth century. When most businesses were still small, family-run affairs, all they needed was a few clerks in the ‘counting house’ to keep the books and write letters. The level of education required for a clerk was not high by today’s standards – basic arithmetic and elegant handwriting were the main requirements – but as long as much of the population was illiterate, clerical work was a relatively high-status occupation. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrialisation had massively increased the size of manufacturing businesses, and vast new enterprises such as the railway companies had been created. There was an urgent need for staff to look after accounts, sales, marketing, personnel and all the other ‘non-productive’ functions of these businesses – functions that today seem to dominate the world of work, but which a century ago came a distant second to the business of making things. At the same time service industries such as banks and insurance companies grew to meet the needs of the large manufacturers, and public administration was also an expanding field. By the early years of the twentieth century governments were increasingly requiring companies to produce public accounts, and eventually to undergo external audits; the leather-bound ledgers of the past were no longer sufficient, and whole offices were dedicated to compiling accounts to satisfy shareholders and tax inspectors.

At the same time, the introduction of compulsory elementary education provided a ready pool of young people, both men and women, looking for an alternative to the skilled or unskilled manual work that had been the only choice for their parents. The numbers speak for themselves: between 1851 and 1901 the number of clerks in the labour force in the United Kingdom rose from around 70,000 to over 2 million. The proportion of these who were female rose from 0.1 per cent to 13.4 per cent in the same period; by 1981 it had reached 74.4 per cent.

The social changes went hand in hand with technological change, led all along by the United States. In that fast-growing country labour was scarce, and there was a great enthusiasm for machines that could increase productivity. The typewriter, patented in America in 1868, was taken up and promoted by Remington, the gunsmiths, who had found demand for their products falling after the end of the Civil War. In 1878 they brought out the Remington 2 typewriter, a design classic that remained in use for decades. Sales leapt from 146 in 1879 to 65,000 in 1890. The women who were entering the clerical labour force in increasing numbers proved to be particularly adept at using the new machine and so established their position in the hitherto male world of business, albeit at a low-paid level. Together with various forms of copying machine, the typewriter made it quicker and easier to communicate and to keep records of communications. Meanwhile, devices that we would hardly think of as ‘inventions’ today, such as index cards and vertical filing cabinets, revolutionised record-keeping. Adding and calculating machines, one popular version of which was patented by William Seward Burroughs in 1883, relieved clerks of the necessity to be accurate calculators themselves.

The office equipment industry boomed, led by a sales force that persuaded managers that simply by buying their machines they were buying greater efficiency. A dreadful poem published in The Clerk in 1937 epitomised this view:

Early to bed and early to rise

Is really very little good

Unless you mechanise.

But others cautioned against buying expensive machines without first analysing the functions of the office as a whole. Chief among these, and the author of several textbooks on office management, was William Henry Leffingwell, a former clerk in a Chicago photographic company, who had risen to become a ‘consulting management engineer’ – one of the first forerunners of the management consultants of today. He wrote: ‘The ingenuity of inventors and the persistence of machinery salesmen have brought about a condition in which the present-day office manager is not asking himself whether or not his office needs a machine of some kind, but what machine he shall choose from among the multitude offered.’

Leffingwell saw the office as fertile ground in which to sow the gospel according to Taylor. He published frequently in the monthly magazine System (founded in 1901, the forerunner of Business Week), and brought out the first of several books, Scientific Office Management, in 1917. His verbose texts covered in minute detail the arrangement of desks to optimise work flow, the distance walked by clerks to reach the water fountain, the design of forms, and even the ‘one best way’ to open a letter. They remained influential for decades: the third edition of his Textbook of Office Management appeared in 1950, three years after his death. Business historians have not been slow to point out the irony that scientific management itself increased the bureaucratic workload through generating forms to be filled, activities to be monitored, and reports to be analysed and filed.

In 1919 Leffingwell founded the National Office Managers’ Association, creating a forum for research, debate and discussion. Its regular publications added to the prolific literature on the subject. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, the Office Machinery Users’ Association, founded in 1915, picked up the importance of giving system precedence over technology and renamed itself the Office Management Association.

Efficiency had long been a priority at Lyons, and the factories were organised very much according to the principles of Taylorism. Each was laid out to handle the particular kind of cake, pie, bun, loaf or bread roll in which it specialised. Under the direction of a Planning Office, every operation was time-and-motion studied to arrive at a fair, efficient time. These times were used both to calculate the number of staff required, and to compute the standard cost of the labour entailed in making the product, which in turn partly determined its selling price. The Lyons company secretary George Booth was interested in extending the same scientific approach to the clerical work of the company. He decided that the best way to find those with the skills to introduce such methods was to venture into graduate recruitment. None of the family board members had been to university, all following their fathers into the business at the earliest opportunity. The usual career path was a spell in the Trocadero kitchens, followed almost immediately by promotion to the management of one or other of the company’s businesses – tea, confectionery or hotels, for example. While some prided themselves on their ability to add up a column of figures rapidly and accurately, they had no experience of mathematical analysis or scientific enquiry. Below general management level in Lyons the usual approach was to recruit school leavers and train them for specific tasks. Academic qualifications had hitherto seemed irrelevant.

In 1923 Booth persuaded the board to add some intellectual rigour to the company’s management by recruiting some of the brightest young minds in the country. One of the five young men who constituted this new class of management trainee was John Simmons, who had just received a first-class degree in mathematics from Cambridge. It could have been a risky experiment: brilliant mathematicians do not always make good managers (some have been notoriously incapable of tying their shoelaces). Nonetheless, either by luck or judgement, in John Simmons Booth had found exactly the person he needed.

Born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1902, John Richardson Mainwaring Simmons was the son and grandson of missionaries who dedicated their lives to spreading the Christian gospel in the Indian subcontinent. His mother died when he was only five. Two years later his father remarried, to a colleague in the Church Missionary Society. A boy of outstanding intellectual gifts, in 1920 John Simmons entered the University of Cambridge to read mathematics, and emerged three years later with first-class honours. At the time his choice of a career in a catering company was somewhat unexpected for a wrangler, the honorific title of Cambridge’s top mathematics graduates. It was even less expected that a company such as Lyons would regard pure mathematics as relevant to its day-to-day activities, beyond the basic task of accurate accounting. Yet Lyons had always been open to progressive ideas in managing its manufacturing operations; it was not hard for Booth to persuade the board that they needed to be equally progressive on the clerical side.

Simmons was unobtrusive in appearance; of medium height and build, he always dressed soberly in a jacket and tie. His hair was neatly combed straight back from his high forehead; his expression was habitually serious but even as a young man he carried an air of absolute conviction. He arrived at Cadby Hall knowing little of business. Nothing in his pious childhood or his years of intellectual endeavour at Cambridge had prepared him for the reality of life at Lyons. On his arrival he was put to work in a department where black-coated clerks still stood at Dickensian high desks entering figures in huge ledgers by hand. Typewriters and adding machines had been introduced into some Lyons departments before 1900 but there had been no serious attempt to rationalise office methods.

A quiet, austere and intellectually exacting man, Simmons found his spiritual home at Lyons; he was to remain with the company for forty-five years. Taken on in the junior role of statistician and management trainee, he nevertheless reported directly to Booth and so had unprecedented access to the highest levels of the Lyons management. Booth gave him a free hand to investigate clerical operations at Lyons and make recommendations. He immediately began to apply his analytical skills to the task of increasing efficiency through eliminating duplication and any unnecessary paperwork. He looked for rational alternatives to methods that had evolved in more or less ad hoc fashion. He streamlined and simplified, breaking jobs down into their component parts and allocating tasks to specialised clerks. He extended the use of office machines wherever they made economic sense.

His top-down approach – analysing the work of the clerks and then telling them how to do it better – owed a great deal to the examples of Taylor and Leffingwell, but he soon found that his mentors had underestimated the human factor. For example, Lyons had three central clerical departments: Accounts, which kept the basic records of incomings and outgoings and managed the payroll; the Stock Department, which kept stock records and computed the costs of producing and distributing Lyons products so that they could be priced accurately; and the Checking Department, which checked the cash takings of the catering establishments against the waitresses’ bills. These departments kept records that were intended only for the general managers on the board. The managers of the individual departments – Bakeries, Teashops and so on – had their own offices and kept separate records for their own purposes.

Simmons initially favoured greater centralisation, and began by trying to bring all clerical work into the three main specialist departments. But he very quickly learned that ‘arguments which applied to machines did not necessarily appeal to human beings’ – a lesson that devotees of scientific management often had to learn the hard way. Imagine his chagrin when he discovered that one departmental manager, deprived of his personal platoon of clerks and told to get the information he needed from the central departments, had simply recreated his original office within a year of the change. Simmons ruefully admitted that ‘records had better be kept where they were going to be used, even if it meant they were kept somewhat less efficiently’.

Other innovations proved more durable. Simmons saw that office machines, such as adding and bookkeeping machines, brought advantages in terms of accuracy and efficiency. There was a problem, however. The American machines were designed to work with the decimal system, suitable for US dollars and cents. The Britain of the 1920s (and indeed for almost fifty years afterwards) used the idiosyncratically non-decimal pounds, shillings and pence of sterling currency. Moreover, weights and measures each had their own units, none of them decimal. In 1928 Simmons solved the problem by training the clerks to convert currency and weights and measures into decimal units before carrying out calculations on the machines, and then back again afterwards. Five years later a textbook, Office Practice, by William Campbell, described this innovation as what was ‘usually’ done.

True to his ancestry, Simmons went about his work with a missionary zeal. The company was supportive of his incremental reforms, but after a few years he felt he needed to establish the scientific approach to management on a more permanent basis. The board agreed to let him set up a department of Systems Research within Lyons – a team of analysts who would investigate inefficiencies and bottlenecks in the company’s office systems and propose solutions. A forerunner of what was later called the Organisation and Methods Department, it was one of the first such research departments in the country. Once it was up and running Simmons recruited a twenty-four-year-old chartered secretary called Geoffrey Mills to manage it. Mills quickly became an effective evangelist for Simmons’s scientific approach, and later published a series of textbooks on office management. Up to this point British authors had been slow to follow the American consultant William Henry Leffingwell’s lead in providing the tools to educate a new generation of managers. Mills’s first book, Office Organization and Method (1949) was dedicated to John Simmons and acknowledged his ‘authoritative criticism and advice’. It referred to Leffingwell’s textbooks, but at the same time echoed Simmons’s own mature reflection on the limits of the scientific approach to running an office. ‘The clerks … are often the most difficult to understand. It is they who make office management an art as well as a science.’

Mills was the architect of another innovation, audacious in its simplicity, that lightened the load on Lyons’s clerical systems by using a new technology to make paperwork unnecessary. In 1935 Systems Research received a plea for help from the Wholesale Bakery Sales Department, which supplied bread and cakes directly to shops all over the country. They found that clerks were drowning in paper, copies of invoices and packing notes, all of which needed to be filed. By using an early microfilm camera, called a Recordak, to make the only record of customers’ orders, they were able to use the same paper order for pricing and valuation, then as a packing list and eventually to return it to the customer as an invoice, leaving nothing to file. It was the first commercial use of microfilm anywhere in the world.

Though they did not know it at the time, the questions Simmons’s young disciples in Systems Research set out to ask, and the analyses they produced – accompanied by beautifully drawn flow charts – were exactly those that would confront businesses two decades later as they grappled with the possibilities of computers in the office.

Simmons’s zeal for reform won him notice well beyond Lyons. In 1933 he became a member of the Office Management Association. A year later he was on the governing council, and by 1938 he was chairman, a post he held until 1950. The Association’s members included representatives of most of the major British industrial and commercial firms, and it regularly held conferences to discuss advances in methods and technology. Simmons, with the confidence born of absolute conviction, placed himself in the vanguard of this movement. If there was anyone in the country who had the experience and vision to recognise what computers could do for a business, it was him.