Time & Perspective Quote by Frederick W. Taylor

Taylor is selling a revolution in workplace power: stop trusting the “great man” and start trusting the method. Coming from the father of scientific management, “in the past the man has been first” is less nostalgia than accusation. Old industry, he implies, ran on foremen’s intuition, craft pride, and the informal leverage of skilled workers who controlled the pace and secrets of production. That world is messy, personal, and—crucially for Taylor—political.

“In the future the system must be first” sounds democratic, even antiseptic: rules over whims, process over ego. The subtext is sharper. A “system” doesn’t just organize work; it relocates authority from the shop floor to management, from tacit knowledge to measurable tasks. It’s an argument for standardization as moral progress, with efficiency framed as an almost scientific virtue. The charm (and danger) of Taylor’s rhetoric is that it turns a labor dispute into a technical problem: if output lags, the culprit isn’t exploitation or resistance, it’s a faulty method.

Then he softens the blow: “developing first class men.” This is the humanist alibi built into the machinery. Taylor anticipates the obvious fear—that systems dehumanize—and replies that good systems elevate people by training, selecting, and fitting them to optimized roles. Yet even here, “developing” carries a managerial tilt: workers are not authors of the system but products of it.

Context matters: early 20th-century industrial expansion, union conflict, and a new faith in measurement. Taylor’s line works because it promises order and uplift while quietly redefining who gets to define “first class.”