Discovering passion

From Bob Kegan's book: "In over our heads, demands of modern life"

“Some things your children do and care about make perfect sense to you,” Lynn muses, “and some make none at all.”  Their eight year old, Rosie, routinely returns from school, heads into the driveway, and, hour after hour, alone or with friends, happily hurls a tennis ball against the door of the garage.

Peter and Lynn might comfort themselves with the thought that perhaps this is how Chris Evert or Roger Clemens began.  Perhaps Rosie does have fantasies of athletic heroics. Perhaps these solitary sessions will eventually give way to organized team sport and the development of skills under a succession of coaches who know what to do with a child’s love for throwing a ball. 

But what if the child has no interest in sports, or whatever interest she does have has little to do with why she lies to spend hours bouncing the ball off the garage door? Perhaps she has no idea herself why she does it.  Maybe she just loves being inside the rhythm of it, or experiencing her certain connection to this flying object, however much it looks as if it is on its own.  Maybe she is fascinated by the different directions and speeds and arcs she can create after the bounce, depending on the initial spin she puts on the ball when she throws it.

Any of these ways of being intrigued can of course be captured by the most well intentioned parent or coach and put to use in a variety of sports.  And when they are, Peter and Lynn may rightly feel that something productive has finally come of all those hours they listed to the repetitive thumping resonating from the garage into the house.  It is a wonderful thing to see a child’s interests develop into rewarding discipline, socially satisfying recreation, or productive pursuits.   Something is surely gained when these rudimentary loves find a fertile soil where they can grow. 

But something is lost, too, if it is predetermined how they should grow.  Better perhaps that something come from the love of bouncing a ball than nothing at all, but in our own need for our child’s activity to have a point or lead somewhere we could be turning away from what is most precious and creative about the activity, namely, that is passionate.  Passion is its own purpose.  Passion can be a bit disdainful of reasonableness and productivity.  And passion is among the most sacred and fragile gifts the gods bestow upon us.  It is fragile before our devastating embarrassment and impatience.  And it is sacred because it promises the possibility of new life. 

If Rosie’s love of bouncing a ball is channeled into some coaching sport, she may find considerable satisfaction and increase as she gains the progressively complex set of skills acquired by hundreds of thousands before her.  This is the flowering of her interests according to a basic design constructed long before she and her interest ever came along.  She might even be a very talented player.  Then she will realize this plan that others created faster and with greater skill than most. 

But none of this has anything to do with her passion or with creativity or with new life.  In fact, the most gifted of those who play a sport, the few who come along in each generation, are probably those who find a way to sustain their passion in the midst of someone else’s design.  These are the ones who just love to play the game.  And while everyone else is totaling statistics, or salaries, or championships won, they are attending to something else – no, like the fans, to what this game means for the season or, like the experts, to their extraordinary mastery of this or that subtlety of the game, but to something else – to a ball they are bouncing against the door of the garage.  The greatest victory of a Kirby Puckett or a Monica Seles may never be in a championship game at all but in the triumph of their passion over the orderly, prefabricated home to which it was brought.  And isn’t this too much to ask of passion – that it only be allowed to ripen into its unique expression if it quiets our need to understand its point by holding, in the meantime, a respectable nine to five job?

If we could imagine all the possibilities a child might realize from her passion for bouncing balls, or setting suns, or the modulations of the human voice it would be like saying that nothing new can happen in the world.  All of life, we would be saying, has already happened, and minding children might be something like seeing to it that mail carriers meet their appointed rounds.

The Jewish mystics say that God makes human beings because God loves stories.  This is quite a modest stance to give an all-powerful all-loving God.  Even God, the mystics are saying, does not know how we are going to come out, so why should we wish for greater control or need it?  Better perhaps for us to emulate this kind of God, whose pleasure in us comes not from our obedience to God’s laws and regularities, however subject we may be to them, but from God’s sheer fascination with how we will live.

For a God like this one, we ourselves are the objects of passionate engagement, endlessly let go of and recovered for a purpose God himself (or God herself) may not yet know.  We ourselves are endlessly let go of and recovered as well, all the while, reverberate against the garage door and through the whole House. 

From .. Kingdom of God, by Tolstoy

Read a chapter of Kingdom of God by Tolstoy. Had got the book from list of books that Gandhi was inspired by. The book was written when Tolstoy was around 50 and facing a spiritual crisis. Had achieved all he could have wanted materially and artistically is what the prefaces typically say. And was asking the question what for and what more? He turned to Christianity and church but was soon dillusioned by it and came out with a series of books and essays damming the church and detailing his spiritual thoughts.. Anyways this book is considered amongst his most influential books on the subject. It is not an easy book to read since it is not just religious in nature but more specifically Christianity focussed. As I usually do when faced with such writings, I was browsing different chapters and settled for no obvious reason on the final chapter, which is about 30 odd pages atleast in itself. I have not completed it yet. But read about half of it. It is an aggrieved, gut wrenching potrayal of the exploitation of the peasants in Russia at the time by the army/govt, all the same, and how it was so against the doctrines of Christ. The narrative thus far is dominated by 2/3 events which detail the domination and torture/murder of the poor, famished, landless peasants by the landlords, govt and army. BUt its the fundamental questions that are weaved in the narrative, which anchor them.

The first question asked is why do the judge, govt and soldier support the torture/murder of these peasants when they all seem to be reasonable people who in private life would not even think of harming or stealing.. But then what made them do these hideous acts without so much as a flutter of the conscience?

The reason given in his experience by each level of individual involved in this crime, is that it is to protect and maintain the status quo of the goverment structure.. My words here are not quite right, but as I understood, it meant; keeping the status quo of the situation, what was right/wrong as government was espousing. So if the Govt. driven social structure was that whoever did not support the Tzar shoudl be punished by death or that the peasants did not have rights versus the higher classses of society adn their supression was essential in order to keep them in check, that had to be maintained.

Tolstoy's argument is two fold. His primary consideration is Why people are believing this? His first reason is that for the judges, landowners and senior govt officials it is their self preservation which makes thme need to maintain the status quo. Those who are in power by supressing teh masses and know that if they are not in power they would be in danger, will have the need to not have the structure challenge it and do everything to keep it. They also know that their current luxuries are built upon the exploitation of the people and attached to the positiosn they hold, not because of whats in them as people. And if they are out of these positions, what work woudl they get? So the reasons for those in power to maintain the status quo is quite obvious.

But then the question is why does the lowest level in that chain who actually perpetuate the crimer and the torture do it? He has rises from the peasant people himself. And those he kills and murders are his companions. Why does he do it? He also does not have greate benefits accruing to him because of the current structure. He is paid poorly. And there is immense dehumanization of his lot. So why does he do it? Tolstoy's experience of speakign to soldiers about how they see their acts consistent with their beliefs as religious Christians, is that they believe that 1) if the Govt is saying this needs to happen, the Govt, all these senior people cannot be wrong, there must be a reason. It is my ignorance. 2) There must be something in Christianity which allows this seeming inconsistency to co-exist. Again it is my ignorance that I dont know it.

But he adds that there is something very distinct that the military does with and to these soldiers to make them kill without a second glance at their conscience. And that is the military code of conduct which says that the soldier shall at all times carry out the orders of his superior without any questions or challenges. And also tha his allegience shall at all times be towards the Tzar and his interests should not be compromised. Tolstoy believes that these aspects of the soldier's training has played a big part in their brainwashing.

He goes on to the argument that this whole business of torture and murder happens because the lowest level of soldier is there as the tool to be used for these acts. The judges and others in Govt who play a role in this act finally taking place never see the consequences of their action or decision. If the soldier refused to act and commit the crime, these higher level officers would not be able to get it executed.

His narrations of the scenes of poor peasants getting flogged, murdered are vivid in their descriptions. That it has affected Tolstoy greatly is evident from the focus and detail these descriptions have in the chapter.

Excerpts from Dalia Lama's interview

Buddhism speaks of idiosyncrasies, latent admirations and underlying tendencies, which together with one's intellect, circumstances and so forth constitute one's karmic dispositions. These are major factors determining which path one should follow.

Question: As self-cherishing and ego-holding are forces which have been active since beginingless time, is it possible to set out upon a spiritual path without developing a negative egoism toward it, leading to sectarianism?
To avoid that it is necessary to take care that your Dharma practice is really a Dharma practice. This way, although the power of familiarity with ego is great, its effects are not overwhelming. If you study Dharma but do not actually apply it, your so-called spiritual activities can easily become directed at material gain, fame and so forth. In which case only egoism and such negativities as anger, attachment, sectarianism, etc. are developed. However, if each word of Dharma that you hear is used to cultivate your mind then every single word brings only benefit, and no matter how much Dharma learning you amass your learning will never go to the development of egoism.
The most important point is to be very careful in the beginning with your motivation in receiving a teaching or doing a practice. If this is done well, there is little danger.
It is important to think very well before entering a particular spiritual tradition. Once you have entered one you should stick to it. Do not be like the man who tastes food in all the different restaurants but never actually gets down to eating a meal. Think carefully before adopting a practice; then follow it through. This way you will get some results from even dedicating a little time each day. Alternatively, if you try to follow all the various paths you will not get anywhere.
Also, patience in practice is required. In this age of machines everything seems to be automatic. You may think that it is the same with Dharma—that by merely turning on a switch you will gain realization. Be patient. The development of mind takes time!
You should try to maintain a steady effort in practice. It is useless to try very hard for a few months, then give up this kind of application and then try very hard again. It is best to exert yourself in a constant and steady way. This is extremely important.
If you have adopted Buddhism you should not consider yourself a 'great Buddhist' and immediately start to do everything differently. A Tibetan proverb states, 'Change your mind but leave your appearance as usual.’
In all of Buddhism and especially in the Mahayana, the benefiting of others is heavily stressed. In this context Shantideva says inVenturing into the Deeds of a Bodhisattva, 'First investigate what is acceptable and what is unacceptable to the people (of the society in which you live); then avoid that which is unacceptable.' Of course, you must consider whether or not what is acceptable and unacceptable is in contradiction with the Dharma. If the social norm does not contradict Dharma you should try to live in accordance with it. In this way people will respect you. This is not done out of vanity but in order to bring the maximum benefit to all.
In Dharma practice it is necessary to always keep an attitude of love toward others, for this is the basis of Bodhicitta. Love is a simple practice, yet it is very beneficial for the individual who practices it as well as for the community in which he lives, for the nation and for the whole world. Love and kindness are always appropriate. Whether or not you believe in rebirth, you will need love in this life. If we have love, there is hope to have real families, real brotherhood, real equanimity, real peace. If the mind of love is lost, if you continue to see other beings as enemies, then no matter how much knowledge or education you have, no matter how much material progress is made, only suffering and confusion will ensue. Beings will continue to deceive and overpower one another. Basically, everyone exists in the very nature of suffering, so to abuse or mistreat each other is futile. The foundation of all spiritual practice is love. That you practice, this well is my only request. Of course, to be able to do so in all situations will take time, but you should not lose courage. If we wish happiness for mankind, it is the only way.

What is the Mind? by HH The Dalai Lama

One of the fundamental views in Buddhism is the principle of "dependent origination." This states that all phenomena, both subjective experiences and external objects, come into existence in dependence upon causes and conditions; nothing comes into existence uncaused. Given this principle, it becomes crucial to understand what causality is and what types of cause there are. In Buddhist literature, two main categories of causation are mentioned: (i) external causes in the form of physical objects and events, and (ii) internal causes such as cognitive and mental events.
The reason for an understanding of causality being so important in Buddhist thought and practice is that it relates directly to sentient beings' feelings of pain and pleasure and the other experiences that dominate their lives, which arise not only from internal mechanisms but also from external causes and conditions. Therefore it is crucial to understand not only the internal workings of mental and cognitive causation but also their relationship to the external material world.
The fact that our inner experiences of pleasure and pain are in the nature of subjective mental and cognitive states is very obvious to us. But how those inner subjective events relate to external circumstances and the material world poses a critical problem. The question of whether there is an external physical reality independent of sentient beings' consciousness and mind has been extensively discussed by Buddhist thinkers. Naturally, there are divergent views on this issue among the various philosophical schools of thought. One such school [Cittamatra] asserts that there is no external reality, not even external objects, and that the material world we perceive is in essence merely a projection of our minds. From many points of view, this conclusion is rather extreme. Philosophically, and for that matter conceptually, it seems more coherent to maintain a position that accepts the reality not only of the subjective world of the mind, but also of the external objects of the physical world.
Now, if we examine the origins of our inner experiences and of external matter, we find that there is a fundamental uniformity in the nature of their existence in that both are governed by the principle of causality. Just as in the inner world of mental and cognitive events, every moment of experience comes from its preceding continuum and so on ad infinitum. Similarly, in the physical world every object and event must have a preceding continuum that serves as its cause, from which the present moment of external matter comes into existence.
In some Buddhist literature, we find that in terms of the origin of its continuum, the macroscopic world of our physical reality can be traced back finally to an original state in which all material particles are condensed into what are known as "space particles." If all the physical matter of our macroscopic universe can be traced to such an original state, the question then arises as to how these particles later interact with each other and evolve into a macroscopic world that can have direct bearing on sentient beings' inner experiences of pleasure and pain. To answer this, Buddhists turn to the doctrine of karma, the invisible workings of actions and their effects, which provides an explanation as to how these inanimate space particles evolve into various manifestations.
The invisible workings of actions, or karmic force (karma means action), are intimately linked to the motivation in the human mind that gives rise to these actions. Therefore an understanding of the nature of mind and its role is crucial to an understanding of human experience and the relationship between mind and matter. We can see from our own experience that our state of mind plays a major role in our day-to-day experience and physical and mental well-being. If a person has a calm and stable mind, this influences his or her attitude and behavior in relation to others. In other words, if someone remains in a state of mind that is calm, tranquil and peaceful, external surroundings or conditions can cause them only a limited disturbance. But it is extremely difficult for someone whose mental state is restless to be calm or joyful even when they are surrounded by the best facilities and the best of friends. This indicates that our mental attitude is a critical factor in determining our experience of joy and happiness, and thus also our good health.
To sum up, there are two reasons why it is important to understand the nature of mind. One is because there is an intimate connection between mind and karma. The other is that our state of mind plays a crucial role in our experience of happiness and suffering. If understanding the mind is very important, what then is mind, and what is its nature?
Buddhist literature, both sutra and tantra, contains extensive discussions on mind and its nature. Tantra, in particular, discusses the various levels of subtlety of mind and consciousness. The sutras do not talk much about the relationship between the various states of mind and their corresponding physiological states. Tantric literature, on the other hand, is replete with references to the various subtleties of the levels of consciousness and their relationship to such physiological states as the vital energy centers within the body, the energy channels, the energies that flow within these and so on. The tantras also explain how, by manipulating the various physiological factors through specific meditative yogic practices, one can effect various states of consciousness.
According to tantra, the ultimate nature of mind is essentially pure. This pristine nature is technically called "clear light." The various afflictive emotions such as desire, hatred and jealousy are products of conditioning. They are not intrinsic qualities of the mind because the mind can be cleansed of them. When this clear light nature of mind is veiled or inhibited from expressing its true essence by the conditioning of the afflictive emotions and thoughts, the person is said to be caught in the cycle of existence, samsara. But when, by applying appropriate meditative techniques and practices, the individual is able to fully experience this clear light nature of mind free from the influence and conditioning of the afflictive states, he or she is on the way to true liberation and full enlightenment.
Hence, from the Buddhist point of view, both bondage and true freedom depend on the varying states of this clear light mind, and the resultant state that meditators try to attain through the application of various meditative techniques is one in which this ultimate nature of mind fully manifests all its positive potential, enlightenment, or Buddhahood. An understanding of the clear light mind therefore becomes crucial in the context of spiritual endeavor.
In general, the mind can be defined as an entity that has the nature of mere experience, that is, "clarity and knowing." It is the knowing nature, or agency, that is called mind, and this is non-material. But within the category of mind there are also gross levels, such as our sensory perceptions, which cannot function or even come into being without depending on physical organs like our senses. And within the category of the sixth consciousness, the mental consciousness, there are various divisions, or types of mental consciousness that are heavily dependent upon the physiological basis, our brain, for their arising. These types of mind cannot be understood in isolation from their physiological bases.
Now a crucial question arises: How is it that these various types of cognitive events—the sensory perceptions, mental states and so forth—can exist and possess this nature of knowing, luminosity and clarity? According to the Buddhist science of mind, these cognitive events possess the nature of knowing because of the fundamental nature of clarity that underlies all cognitive events. This is what I described earlier as the mind's fundamental nature, the clear light nature of mind. Therefore, when various mental states are described in Buddhist literature, you will find discussions of the different types of conditions that give rise to cognitive events. For example, in the case of sensory perceptions, external objects serve as the objective, or causal condition; the immediately preceding moment of consciousness is the immediate condition; and the sense organ is the physiological or dominant condition. It is on the basis of the aggregation of these three conditions—causal, immediate and physiological—that experiences such as sensory perceptions occur.
Another distinctive feature of mind is that it has the capacity to observe itself. The issue of mind's ability to observe and examine itself has long been an important philosophical question. In general, there are different ways in which mind can observe itself. For instance, in the case of examining a past experience, such as things that happened yesterday you recall that experience and examine your memory of it, so the problem does not arise. But we also have experiences during which the observing mind becomes aware of itself while still engaged in its observed experience. Here, because both observing mind and observed mental states are present at the same time, we cannot explain the phenomenon of the mind becoming self-aware, being subject and object simultaneously, through appealing to the factor of time lapse.
Thus it is important to understand that when we talk about mind, we are talking about a highly intricate network of different mental events and state. Through the introspective properties of mind we can observe, for example, what specific thoughts are in our mind at a given moment, what objects our minds are holding, what kinds of intentions we have and so on. In a meditative state, for example, when you are meditating and cultivating a single- pointedness of mind, you constantly apply the introspective faculty to analyze whether or nor your mental attention is single-pointedly focused on the object, whether there is any laxity involved, whether you are distracted and so forth. In this situation you are applying various mental factors and it is not as if a single mind were examining itself. Rather, you are applying various different types of mental factor to examine your mind.
As to the question of whether or not a single mental state can observe and examine itself, this has been a very important and difficult question in the Buddhist science of mind. Some Buddhist thinkers have maintained that there s a faculty of mind called "self- consciousness," or "self-awareness." It could be said that this is an apperceptive faculty of mind, one that can observe itself. But this contention has been disputed. Those who maintain that such an apperceptive faculty exists distinguish two aspects within the mental, or cognitive, event. One of these is external and object-oriented in the sense that there is a duality of subject and object, while the other is introspective in nature and it is this that enables the mind to observe itself. The existence of this apperceptive self-cognizing faculty of mind has been disputed, especially by the later Buddhist philosophical school of thought the Prasangika.
In our own day-to-day experiences we can observe that, especially on the gross level, our mind is interrelated with and dependent upon the physiological states off the body. Just as our state of mind, be it depressed or joyful, affects our physical health, so too does our physical state affect our mind.
As I mentioned earlier, Buddhist tantric literature mentions specific energy centers within the body that may, I think, have some connection with what some neurobiologists call the second brain, the immune system. These energy centers play a crucial role in increasing or decreasing the various emotional states within our mind. It is because of the intimate relationship between mind and body and the existence of these special physiological centers within our body that physical yoga exercises and the application of special meditative techniques aimed at training the mind can have positive effects on health. It has been shown, for example, that by applying appropriate meditative techniques, we can control our respiration and increase or decrease our body temperature.
Furthermore, just as we can apply various meditative techniques during the waking state so too, on the basis of understanding the subtle relationship between mind and body, can we practice various meditations while we are in dream states. The implication of the potential of such practices is that at a certain level it is possible to separate the gross levels of consciousness from gross physical states and arrive at a subtler level of mind and body. In other words, you can separate your mind from your coarse physical body. You could, for example, separate your mind from your body during sleep and do some extra work that you cannot do in your ordinary body. However, you might not get paid for it!
So you can see here the clear indication of a close link between body and mind: they can be complementary. In light of this, I am very glad to see that some scientists are undertaking significant research in the mind/body relationship and its implications for our understanding of the nature of mental and physical well-being. My old friend Dr. Benson [Herbert Benson, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School], for example, has been carrying out experiments on Tibetan Buddhist meditators for some years now. Similar research work is also being undertaken in Czechoslovakia. Judging by our findings so far, I feel confident that there is still a great deal to be done in the future.
As the insights we gain from such research grow, there is no doubt that our understanding of mind and body, and also of physical and mental health, will be greatly enriched. Some modern scholars describe Buddhism not as a religion but as a science of mind, and there seem to be some grounds for this claim.

From Aristotle's doctrine of the mean

Missing the mark is possible in a virtually indefinite number of ways. A person aiming at a target can miss to the right, to the left, above, below; a crooked shot can glance off the target, etc. To hit the mark one must land a shot within a relatively small, more or less precisely defined, area. Just so, Aristotle suggests, what is excellent and commendable to do is definite and limited. There is a correspondingly vast, relatively unlimited, area for wrongs and shots that miss the mark:

Missing the mark is possible in many ways (for badness is a form of the indefinite, to use Pythagorean terms, and goodness a form of the definite), while success can be had only one way (which is why it is easy to err and hard to succeed -- easy to miss the mark and hard to hit it). (1106b29-33)

Now while hitting the mark is in this sense a much more precise matter than missing it, there is still room for variation within the shots that hit the mark. More than one shot can hit the bulls-eye of a good-sized target, and all such hits are scored the same. And a shot need not hit the exact center of the bulls-eye to be an excellent one. In the same way, Aristotle's simile suggests, virtue rarely demands a single precisely determined act, or an emotional reaction of a particular intensity, duration, frequency, etc. It rather demands that one's acts or emotions fall somewhere within a more or less precisely delineated range.


For example, the person who flees from every danger is cowardly; the person who does not flee from anything is rash. What is courageous, then, falls somewhere between these extremes; courage is "preserved by the observance of the mean" (1104a26). The same is true of temperance; what is temperate lies in a mean between the extremes of excessive enjoyment of sensual pleasures and deficient enjoyment of such pleasures. Similar things, Aristotle thinks, can be said for each virtue. There are important differences among the dispositions Aristotle calls virtues, of course; but each virtue involves the observance of a mean between extremes. One extreme consists in some sort of excess; another in some sort of deficiency, though (as I shall argue) this way of talking can mislead. Our task in trying to be good is to find these means and avoid these opposed extremes.
The means in question are "relative to us." What are we to make of this? Aristotle explains:

By the mean of a thing I mean what is equally distant from either extreme, which is one and the same for everyone; by the mean relative to us what is neither too much nor too little, and this is not the same for everyone. For instance, if ten are many and two few, we take the mean of the the thing if we take six; since it exceeds and is exceeded by the same amount; this then is the mean according to arithmetic proportion. But we cannot arrive thus at the mean relative to us. Let ten lbs. of food be a large portion for someone and two lbs. a small portion; it does not follow that a trainer will prescribe six lbs., for maybe even this amount will be a large portion, or a small one, for the particular athlete who is to receive it.... In the same way then one with understanding in any matter avoids excess and deficiency, and searches out and chooses the mean -- the mean, that is, not of the thing itself but relative to us. (1106a29-b8; cf. EE II.5, 1222a23-37)

"The mean according to arithmetic proportion" is a point, a fixed and determinate amount. We cannot arrive at the mean relative to us by this method, for at least four reasons. First, the mean relative to us need not be equidistant from two opposed extremes the way an arithmetic mean is. Secondly, unlike an arithmetic mean, the mean relative to us is "of considerable range and not indivisible" (On Generation and Corruption 334b26-30); by this Aristotle means that it is not an extensionless point. Thirdly, as we have seen, Aristotle's target simile suggests that there is room for variation among shots all of which hit the target. What virtue or excellence demands is not a fixed and determinate act or emotional response on a particular occasion, but that our acts and emotions fall within a certain more or less precisely delineated range. Aristotle himself points out that in practical matters the arithmetic mean is not particularly useful (see, e.g., Topics139b21, 149a35-b4; On the Heavens 312b2). Fourthly, each of us is different; the mean relative to us will consequently also be different, and cannot be determined without close attention to features of the persons to whom such means are relative and the circumstances in which those persons are placed. The importance of this will become clear when I turn in section II to discussing particular Aristotelian virtues.
Seen one way, then, the possibilities for error are indefinitely various. Any shot that misses the mark in any direction qualifies. There is a sense, then, in which the remark Aristotle quotes at 1106b35 -- "there is but one way to act nobly, many ways to act basely" -- is true. Seen another way, however, the recipe for such error is absolutely precise: any shot that lands anywhere beyond the fixed edge of the target counts. This comports well with what Aristotle says earlier about excellence of character, that there is nothing fixed and invariable about matters of excellent or virtuous conduct (1104a4-12); the excellent thing to do is anything which falls within a certain range. What is excellent depends upon circumstances, just as the appropriate amount of food or exercise does. It cannot be determined with arithmetic precision (1104a1-6).

Scientific management started as a way to work. How did it become a way of life?

Not So Fast
by Jill Lepore October 12, 2009



Ordering people around, which used to be just a way to get things done, was elevated to a science in October of 1910, when Louis Brandeis, a fifty-three-year-old lawyer from Boston, held a meeting at an apartment in New York with a bunch of experts who, at Brandeis’s urging, decided to call what they were experts at “scientific management.” Everyone there—including Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, best known today as the parents in “Cheaper by the Dozen”—had contracted “Tayloritis”: they were enthralled by an industrial engineer from Philadelphia named Frederick Winslow Taylor, who had been ordering people around, scientifically, for years. Speedy Taylor, as he was called, had invented a new way to make money. He would get himself hired by some business; spend a while watching people work, stopwatch and slide rule in hand; write a report telling them how to do their work faster; and then submit an astronomical bill for his services. He is the “Father of Scientific Management” (it says so on his tombstone), and, by any rational calculation, the grandfather of management consulting.



Whether he was also a shameless fraud is a matter of some debate, but not, it must be said, much: it’s difficult to stage a debate when the preponderance of evidence falls to one side. In “The Management Myth: Why the Experts Keep Getting It Wrong” (Norton; $27.95), Matthew Stewart points out what Taylor’s enemies and even some of his colleagues pointed out, nearly a century ago: Taylor fudged his data, lied to his clients, and inflated the record of his success. As it happens, Stewart did the same things during his seven years as a management consultant; fudging, lying, and inflating, he says, are the profession’s stock-in-trade. Stewart had just finished a D.Phil. at Oxford in philosophy when he took a job rigging spreadsheets to tell companies whose business he barely understood how to trim costs, and he feels sullied by it. This gives his acerbic account an edgy urgency, but you begin to wonder, given how he felt about it, why he stuck with it for so long (the money, the money). Anyway, now he’s blowing the whistle, telling entertaining and slightly shocking stories, like the one about how his boss taught his twenty-something trainees—Stewart reports that one in six graduating seniors at élite colleges is recruited to work in management-consulting firms—how to conduct a “two-handed regression”: “When a scatter plot failed to show the significant correlation between two variables that we all knew was there, he would place a pair of meaty hands over the offending clouds of data points and thereby reveal the straight line hiding from conventional mathematics.” Management consulting isn’t a science, Stewart says; it’s a party trick.



Some party. Modern-day management consulting may be precisely nine-tenths shtick and one-tenth Excel, but that doesn’t explain the appeal of scientific management for Louis Brandeis, who wasn’t easily duped. Brandeis, born in Kentucky in 1856, was just twenty when he finished Harvard Law School, with the highest grades anyone there had ever received; Charles Eliot, the university’s president, had to waive a minimum-age requirement to allow him to graduate. He swiftly earned a reputation as a hardheaded and public-minded reformer, the “people’s attorney.” The man who wrote “The Curse of Bigness” earnestly believed—and plainly, to some degree, he was right—that scientific management would improve the lot of the little guy by raising wages, reducing the cost of goods, and elevating the standard of living. “Of all the social and economic movements with which I have been connected,” Brandeis wrote, “none seems to me to be equal to this in its importance and hopefulness.” Scientific management would bring justice to an unjust world. “Efficiency is the hope of democracy,” he avowed.



Brandeis gathered Taylor’s disciples—Taylor, busy man, sent his regrets—at that 1910 meeting because he was in the process of arguing, in hearings before the Interstate Commerce Committee, that railroad companies shouldn’t be allowed to raise their freight rates. He had read at least one of Taylor’s books, “Shop Management” (1903), and he thought that the railroads, rather than raising rates, should cut costs by Taylorizing: hire a man like Taylor, have him review their operations, and teach them to do everything more efficiently. Taylor often called what he did “task management.” The Gilbreths dubbed their system the “one best way.” Brandeis wanted, for the whole shebang, one best name. At that October meeting, someone suggested calling it, simply, “efficiency,” the watchword of the day, but in the end the vote was unanimous in favor of “scientific management,” which does have a nice ring to it, just like “home economics.”



Scientific management promised to replace rules of thumb with accurate measurements. At the I.C.C., Brandeis began by establishing that the railroads had no real idea why they charged what they did. When he questioned Charles Daly, the vice-president of a New York railroad, Daly said that setting prices came down to judgment and, when Brandeis asked him to explain the basis of that judgment, Daly fell right into his trap. “The basis of my judgment,” he began, “is exactly the same as the basis of a man who knows how to play a good game of golf. It comes from practice, contact and experience”:


MR. BRANDEIS: I want to know, Mr. Daly, just as clearly as you can state it, whether you can give a single reason, based on anything more than your arbitrary judgment, as you have expressed it.
MR. DALY: None whatever.
MR. BRANDEIS: None whatever?
MR. DALY: None whatever.



Brandeis next set about demonstrating that freight rates could be determined, scientifically, by introducing, as evidence, Taylor’s work at the Bethlehem Steel Company. Before Taylor went to Bethlehem, a team of seventy-five men loaded ninety-two-pound pigs of iron onto rail cars at a rate of twelve and a half tons per man per day. By timing the workers with a stopwatch, Taylor showed that a “first-class man” could load pig iron at a rate of forty-seven and a half tons per day, if he would only stop loafing. Ironworkers, Taylor thought, were as dumb as dray horses, and ought to be dealt with accordingly. To Taylor, the wealthy son of Philadelphia aristocrats, most of them were also altogether foreign, something he made sure to underscore. He told the story of managing a man he called Schmidt:“Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?” “Vell, I don’t know vat you mean. . . .” “You see that car?” “Yes.” “Well, if you are a high-priced man, you will load that pig iron on that car tomorrow for $1.85. Now do wake up and answer my question. Tell me whether you are a high-priced man or not.” “Vell, did I got $1.85 for loading dot pig iron on dot car to-morrow?” “Yes, of course you do. . . .” “Vell, dot’s all right.”

(“Who is this Schmidt?” journalists asked, “and what ever happened to him?” Taylor hedged.)


Brandeis’s star witness turned out to be Frank Gilbreth, who, with his wife, specialized in motion study. Where Taylor dissected a job into timed tasks, the Gilbreths divided human action into seventeen motions, which they called “therbligs”—it’s an eponymous anagram—in order to determine the one best way to do a piece of work. Where Taylor used a stopwatch, the Gilbreths used a motion-picture camera. On the stand, Gilbreth, a burly former bricklayer and consummate showman, grabbed a stack of law books, pretended they were bricks, and built a wall, explaining how to eliminate wasted motion. The commissioners, mesmerized, craned their necks and leaned over their desks to get a better view. “This has become sort of a substitute for religion for you,” one of them said, awed. Gilbreth could only agree. (In his diary, Gilbreth once wrote about plans to write a book called “The Religion of Scientific Management.”) At one point, Brandeis hushed the room by making an astonishing claim: with scientific management, the railroads could save a million dollars a day. A million dollars a day! Suddenly, those theretofore obscure I.C.C. hearings seized the nation’s attention. Brandeis won the case, and Taylor became a household name. In 1911, Taylor explained his methods—Schmidt and the pig iron, Gilbreth and the bricks—in “The Principles of Scientific Management,” whose argument the business über-guru Peter Drucker once called “the most powerful as well as the most lasting contribution America has made to Western thought since the Federalist Papers.” That’s either very silly or chillingly cynical, but “The Principles of Scientific Management” was the best-selling business book in the first half of the twentieth century. Taylor always said that scientific management would usher in a “mental revolution,” and it has. Modern life is Taylorized life, the Taylor biographer Robert Kanigel observed, a dozen years back. Above your desk, the clock is ticking; on the shop floor, the camera is rolling. Manage your time, waste no motion, multitask: your iPhone comes with a calendar, your car with a memo pad. “Who is Schmidt?” journalists wanted to know, a century ago. Vell, ve are.



In 1908, Edwin Gay, a Harvard economics professor, visited Taylor in Philadelphia. Gay had been frustrated in his efforts to start a business school at Harvard: “I am constantly being told by businessmen that we cannot teach business.” After meeting Taylor, Gay declared, “I am convinced that there is a scientific method involved in and underlying the art of business.” If scientific laws, deducible from observation, govern the management of business, then business, as an academic discipline, was a much easier sell. Harvard Business School opened later that year, with Gay as its dean. Taylor went to Cambridge and delivered a series of lectures, which he repeated every year until his death.

Taylor is the mortar, and the Gilbreths the bricks, of every American business school. But it was Brandeis who brought Taylor national and international acclaim. He could not, for all that, have saved the railroads a million dollars a day—the number was, as a canny reporter noted, the “merest moonshine”—because, despite the parade of experts and algorithms, the figure was based on little more than a ballpark estimate that the railroads were about five per cent inefficient. That’s the way Taylorism usually worked. How did Taylor arrive at forty-seven and a half tons for Bethlehem Steel? He chose twelve “large, powerful Hungarians,” observed them for an hour, and calculated that, at the rate they were working, they were loading twenty-four tons of pig iron per man per day. Then he handpicked ten men and dared them to load sixteen and a half tons as fast as they could. They managed to do it in fourteen minutes; this yields a rate of seventy-one tons per man per ten-hour day. Taylor inexplicably rounded up the number to seventy-five. To get to forty-seven and a half, he reduced seventy-five by about forty per cent, claiming that this represented a work-to-rest ratio of the “law of heavy laboring.” Workers who protested the new standards were fired. Only one—the best approximation of an actual Schmidt was a man named Henry Noll—loaded anything close to forty-seven and a half tons in a single day, a rate that was, in any case, not sustainable. After providing two years of consulting services, Taylor billed the company a hundred thousand dollars (which works out to something like two and a half million dollars today), and then he was fired.



Brandeis, like many Progressives, believed Taylor, and believed in him. What shocked him was that the unions didn’t. Brandeis had long been a labor hero. Convinced that lawyers, by taking the side of capital, had “allowed themselves to become adjuncts of great corporations,” he had campaigned for an eight-hour day and deftly arbitrated labor disputes, including the New York garment workers’ strike of 1910. But, early in 1911, while delivering a speech called “Organized Labor and Efficiency” before the Boston Central Labor Union, he was heckled. “You can call it scientific management if you want to,” a woman shouted, “but I call it scientific driving.”


Brandeis, ever hopeful, pressed on. The following year, he wrote the foreword for Frank Gilbreth’s “Primer of Scientific Management,” attempting to explain, once again, why the unions should embrace it. “Under Scientific Management men are led, not driven,” he insisted. By then, Taylor had come under the scrutiny of Congress, which formed the House Committee to Investigate Taylor and Other Systems of Shop Management. In the last months of 1911, the committee took testimony from sixty witnesses—workers and experts alike—and, in January, 1912, called Taylor. Facing the committee chairman, William Bauchop Wilson, a Democrat from Pennsylvania who had gone down into the coal pits at the age of nine and joined the union at eleven, Taylor didn’t offer up Schmidt and the pig iron—he had trotted out that story too many times, and people were getting suspicious—but he did tell another of his favorite yarns, the one about the science of shovelling. “The ordinary pig-iron handler” is not suited to shovelling coal, Taylor said. “He is too stupid.” But a first-class man, who could lift a shovelful weighing twenty-one and a half pounds, could move a pile of coal lickety-split. “You have told us the effect on the pile,” an exasperated committee member said, but “what about the effect on the man?” Wilson wanted to know what happened to workers who weren’t “first-class men”:


THE CHAIRMAN: Scientific management has no place for such men?
MR. TAYLOR: Scientific management has no place for a bird that can sing and won’t sing. . . .
THE CHAIRMAN: We are not . . . dealing with horses nor singing birds, but we are dealing with men who are a part of society and for whose benefit society is organized.



Taylor knew that he had performed badly. Asked to proof the transcript of his testimony, he ordered a lackey to steal Wilson’s copy of “The Principles of Scientific Management.” Taylor had the idea that he could lift passages from his book and dump them into his testimony—replacing what he had actually said, under oath—but then he worried that the switch would be too risky if Wilson had the chance to compare the transcript with the book. He didn’t get away with it. Speedy Taylor had met his match. The next year, the President appointed William Bauchop Wilson the Secretary of Labor. But, by then, Taylorism had permeated the culture. So had therbligs: Life published a cartoon about the fifteen unnecessary motions of a kiss.



About half of “The Management Myth” is an exposé of management consulting (the emperor has no clothes); the rest is Stewart’s exploration of his erstwhile profession’s checkered past (the emperor never did), although the kind of business book people have been buying for, oh, the past half century is instruction (you, too, can be an emperor!). Tom Peters’s “In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies” is in its gazillionth printing. Still, if the economy takes another turn for the worse there’s surely money to be made selling books that decry the making of money. Frederick Winslow Taylor makes a great villain, but Stewart needs him to be ridiculous, which makes it difficult to appreciate Brandeis’s argument: there was waste, there were inefficiencies, and Taylorizing did improve the standard of living, at least as measured by consumption. Whatever has happened since, Ford Motor Company did once pay its workers well, build good cars fast, and sell them cheap to people who, suddenly, could afford them.



Much of Stewart’s account is devoted to following the anti-Taylor and neo-Taylor theories that have determined the curriculum at business schools in the course of the past century. He pays special attention to human-factors science and follows through several chapters the work of Harvard Business School’s Michael Porter, whose early books “Competitive Strategy” (1980) and “Competitive Advantage” (1985) launched a field known as strategic management. (I should perhaps mention that, in the late eighties, Porter was my boss. His phone rang off the hook, and I, a temporary secretary, had the job of answering it.) To Stewart, strategic management is scientific management, without the stopwatch. And, along with much else taught in business schools, and everything that goes on in management-consulting firms, “it contributes to a misunderstanding about the sources of our prosperity.”



Business schools have been indicted before. Earning an M.B.A. has been found to have little correlation with later business success. Business isn’t a science, critics say; it’s a set of skills, best learned on the job. Some business schools, accused of teaching nothing so much as greed, now offer ethics courses. Stewart argues that this whole conversation, about people, production, wealth, and virtue, is a conversation about ethics, and is better had within a liberal-arts curriculum. His howl of frustration, after all those years spent living in hotels, peddling nonsense, and profiting by it, is loud and angry. It’s also only half the story.



Scientific management didn’t just change businesses and business schools. Speeding up production meant that workers came home knackered. Some Bethlehem ironworkers were so wrecked after a Taylor-size day’s work that they couldn’t get out of bed the next morning. In 1914, Henry Ford announced a five-dollar, eight-hour workday—generous terms, at the start—but, after that, salaries froze even as the speed of production increased, and, meanwhile, Ford kept reducing his workforce. Edmund Wilson, in “American Jitters,” later quoted a Ford worker saying, “Ye’re worked like a slave all day and when ye get out ye’re too tired to do anything.” Brandeis hoped that this autoworker might spend his evening at a lecture or a political rally, but, more likely, he went home and collapsed on the couch while his wife, who, quite possibly, had put in eight hours at Ford, too, made dinner and got the children ready for bed—efficiently! For lots of people, particularly the growing number of working women, speeding up at work, which you might think would mean slowing down at home, enjoying that promised land of leisure, meant just the opposite: home got sped up, too. No one knew that better than Frank Gilbreth’s wife, who had a lot to say on the subject of exhaustion, and who understood, better than Taylor and Brandeis did, that scientific management isn’t the kind of thing you can leave at the office.

Lillian Gilbreth was pregnant with her fifth child when she attended that meeting with Brandeis in New York, in October of 1910. Taylor taught efficiency; Brandeis championed it; Gilbreth lived it. Born in Oakland in 1878, she graduated from the University of California in 1900 and married Frank Gilbreth four years later. They agreed to have twelve children, six boys and six girls, and to raise them by the most scientific methods, as Jane Lancaster relates in a 2004 biography, “Making Time.” In an era of rapidly shrinking family size, the Gilbreths’ household, a laboratory of efficiency, would show the world what economies of scale were all about. Between 1905 and 1922, Lillian gave birth thirteen times, at fifteen-month intervals; one child died, at the age of five, of diphtheria. She breast-fed every baby. The wonderful zaniness of the Gilbreths’ family life was recorded by two of their children in “Cheaper by the Dozen,” published in 1948. The Gilbreths held weekly Family Council meetings. Once, one of the boys made a motion to get a puppy. Seconded, and opened for discussion: “He could eat scraps of food,” another of the boys piped up. “He would save us waste and would save motions for the garbage man.” Called to a vote: ten in favor, one abstention (Lillian), and one opposed (Frank). They named the dog Mr. Chairman. In 1950, the book was made into a film starring Myrna Loy as Boss, which is what Frank called his wife. Lillian disliked and was embarrassed by both the book and the film, not least because they ignore the fact that, during those years, she ran a business, became the first pioneer of scientific management to earn a doctorate, and wrote many books.


Admittedly, it’s hard to see past all those pregnancies. In 1906, after the San Francisco earthquake, William Randolph Hearst offered a hundred dollars to anyone who had a baby in his emergency hospital. Frank, who was in the city courting building contracts, wrote to his wife, ribbing her, “I think there is a chance for you if you hurry.” He named their summer place the Shoe, after the woman with too many children, who lived in one, and didn’t know what to do. Once, when he told a colleague, “Lillie always feels better when she is pregnant,” the other guy shot back, “How the hell can she tell?”



Frank considered postpartum bed rest to be wasted time (“Dear Boss,” he wrote, “MOTION IS MONEY”), so Lillian used the weeks after childbirth to edit her husband’s books, most of which she also co-wrote, or, as several scholars believe, wrote entirely, even when her name didn’t appear on the title page. (Lillian’s prose is distinctively “gabby,” as Frank put it.) In 1911, she edited “Motion Study,” after giving birth to Frank, Jr., and it was likely Lillian, not her husband, who wrote “The Primer of Scientific Management.” The following year, the Gilbreths moved to Rhode Island so that Lillian could enroll in a Ph.D. program at Brown, where she studied psychology, something that she thought was missing from Taylorism. In Providence, the Gilbreths lived so close to campus, Frank joked, that Lillian “could go to class and if a child fell out of the window, catch him before he landed on the ground.”



Meanwhile, Taylorized workers kept complaining about being bone-tired. In 1911, molders at an arsenal in Watertown, Massachusetts, refused to work under the eye of a timekeeper. Pouring a mold and making a gun carriage usually took fifty-three minutes; Taylor’s timekeeper told the molders to do it in twenty-four. During an investigation into the ensuing strike, it came out that Taylor had told his timekeeper not to bother too much with the stopwatch—better simply to make “a rough guess.” In a petition to their boss, the molders wrote, “This we believe to be the limit of our endurance. It is humiliating to us, who have always tried to give the Government the best that was in us. This method is un-American.”



Taylor, plagued by controversy, grew ill. He sometimes sent Frank Gilbreth to deliver lectures in his place. Increasingly, though, the Gilbreths had misgivings about Taylorism. In 1913, when Frank was substituting for Taylor in Chicago, Lillian went along, with a three-month-old nursling. Onstage, Frank was challenged by Emma Goldman. He was pointing to a chart illustrating the hierarchical relationship between the foreman and the worker. “There is nothing in scientific management for the workman,” Goldman shouted. “The only scheme is to have the workman support the loafers on top of him.” Lillian leaned over and whispered something to Frank, who cheerfully turned the chart upside down. That was just a stunt, of course, but Lillian had an argument to make, which she put forward in “The Psychology of Management,” published in 1914: “The emphasis in successful management lies on the man, not on the work.” And maybe even on the women and children, too.



Gilbreth defended her dissertation in June, 1915. Three months later, she fell down a flight of stairs, went into labor, and gave birth to a stillborn baby. Taylor had died earlier that year. After reading in a fawning biography how much Taylor loved the workers, Frank Gilbreth scrawled in the margin, “But none came to his funeral, nor to his memorial service.” Brandeis was there, though, and delivered a speech that was later printed in Harper’s under the title “Efficiency by Consent.” Brandeis’s considered ideas about management were actually far closer to the Gilbreths’ than to Taylor’s. Taylor thought that men were mules. Brandeis advocated industrial democracy: workers must have a voice in how a business is run. The Gilbreths favored putting a suggestion box in the workplace. Taylor took nothing from the Watertown Arsenal strike except that it might be better “not to try to hurry task work too fast.” Brandeis insisted that, if workers were to enjoy sufficient leisure to participate in a democratic society, productivity had to be increased, but he also worried that, without unions, workers would be pushed past the limits of human endurance. That’s why unions, he believed, ought to consent to efficiency. Gilbreth, Inc., made a policy of requiring contracts to be signed by both shop bosses and representatives from organized labor.

The year after Taylor died, Brandeis was nominated to the Supreme Court. It was one of the most controversial nominations in the Court’s history. The reason for the controversy, Brandeis observed, was that he “is considered a radical and is a Jew.” Much of the opposition had to do with his support of unions. One member of the Senate Judiciary Committee said, “The real crime of which this man is guilty is that he has exposed the iniquities of men in high places in our financial system. He has not stood in awe of the majesty of wealth.” The president of Harvard, A. Lawrence Lowell, circulated a petition opposing Brandeis’s nomination, but, when Lowell’s predecessor, Charles Eliot, sent a letter of support, Brandeis’s law partner boasted, “Next to a letter from God, we have got the best.” Brandeis took a seat on the Court in June, 1916.
That year, Lillian Gilbreth checked the galleys of a book called “Fatigue Study” while recovering from the birth of her ninth child. Taylor had studied fatigue, too, but Gilbreth had a different kind of knowledge of what it meant to be at the limits of physical endurance. She also shared Brandeis’s view that profit wasn’t everything. The whole point of efficiency, she said, was to maximize “happiness minutes.” Happiness minutes? For Lillian Gilbreth, scientific management wasn’t just a business practice; it was a habit of mind and a way of life.



In 1918, she was invited to lecture about motion and fatigue at M.I.T. She must have been practicing the presentation at home. One night, the children invited her to play a game of charades. “What do you think the first one was?” she wrote to Frank. “Well, it was ‘Fatigue Survey.’ How is that for breathing it in?” On the day of the lecture, she got five children ready for school, nursed her four-month-old, handed the two toddlers over to the housekeeper, and caught a ten-o’clock train. In Cambridge, she talked for twenty minutes and showed thirty-six slides (reporting to Frank that she tried very hard to talk like a scientist, and “not like a Lady”), but, when asked to stay late, she told her host that she had eight children to get home to. (“That seemed to interest him a lot.”) She made it back to Providence for the 6:30 P.M. nursing.


In 1919, in childbed after delivering baby No. 10, Lillian proofread galleys of “Motion Study for the Handicapped.” (The Gilbreths had worked with soldiers who had lost limbs; aiding the disabled was a long-standing Gilbreth specialty.) Five years later, Frank Gilbreth died, at the age of fifty-five, leaving his wife with eleven children under the age of nineteen. She was determined to send them all to college, but she didn’t have much money. She tried, desperately, to drum up business. She studied the relationship between menstruation and fatigue among factory women, and got hired by Johnson & Johnson to conduct market research on sanitary napkins. But many clients, after discovering that the president of Gilbreth, Inc., was a woman, simply dropped their accounts. Scrambling, she decided to reinvent herself as an expert in a subject about which she knew next to nothing: housekeeping.



The American Home Economics Association was founded in 1909 (the year before Brandeis coined the term “scientific management”), after some debate over whether the field should be called “home science.” For a while, housekeeping, like business, aspired to be an academic discipline. In that effort, Gilbreth seems an unlikely figure. Her husband had always endorsed a three-man plan of promotion. There’s the guy at the bottom, studying to be the guy in the middle, and the guy in the middle, studying to be the guy at the top. “Don’t waste your time on housework, Boss,” he told his wife. “You’re studying for my job.” Lillian, who loved parenting, couldn’t cook or clean or do laundry. About kitchens, one of her sons wrote, “Stoves burned her, ice picks stabbed her, graters skinned her, and paring knives cut her.” Her handyman and, later, housekeeper, an Irishman named Tom Grieves, did all the cooking. Gilbreth knew how to make exactly one meal, which she served on Grieves’s days off: creamed chipped beef. Her children called it D.V.O.T.: Dog’s Vomit on Toast.

In the nineteen-twenties, she engineered model kitchens—one was called the Kitchen Efficient—and purported to eliminate, for instance, five out of every six steps in the making of coffee cake. To make a lemon-meringue pie, a housewife working in an ordinary kitchen walked two hundred and twenty-four feet; in the Kitchen Efficient, Gilbreth claimed, it could be done in ninety-two. (If you have an island in your kitchen, or a rolling cart, or if you think about a work triangle, you’ve got Lillian Gilbreth to thank.) The increasingly strange study of fatigue went on without her. In 1927, by which time Gilbreth was a chief consultant for American universities’ new departments of home economics, the Harvard Business School opened a Fatigue Laboratory: professors put students on treadmills until they dropped. (Later, a team from the Fatigue Laboratory went to Mississippi, to measure the sweat of sharecroppers living in Benoit—a town of “colorfully dressed, happy, and well-behaved negroes”—against the exertion of mules.)


At around the same time, Gilbreth published “The Home-maker and Her Job.” A housewife should make a study of the science of dishwashing, in order to find the one best way: “In washing dishes, Mary may have the best posture, Mother may move her eyes and head least, Johnny may move his feet least, Sarah may make the best use of her hands.” The trick was to combine the best of everyone’s methods, and then Mary, Mother, Johnny, and Sarah could spend more time doing something other than washing the dishes.



In 1935, Lillian Gilbreth, who did not wash dishes, accepted a professorship at Purdue. Her academic appointment was divided between the university’s School of Home Economics and its School of Management. Home economics and business management have Lillian Gilbreth in common, and a lot more besides. Scientific housekeeping, with its standards of spotlessness and shininess, was founded on no less a fudge than the forty-seven and a half tons of pig iron. Tom Grieves was Gilbreth’s Schmidt. “You know what a Motion Study is, Frankie-boy?” Grieves once asked Frank, Jr. “You study how to get somebody else to make all your motions for you, for Christ sake.” He refused to work in the Kitchen Efficient; he rejected even a refrigerator; he was unwilling to give up the daily, sociable visits of the iceman, who was a good friend of his. Reporters who wanted to profile Gilbreth couldn’t go into her actual kitchen. They had to visit the fake one.



Gilbreth tried to teach people to save time for joy, but not everyone wants to hurry a pie. Sometimes the best part of making a pie is the mess, and rolling the dough too thin so you’ve got some extra for jam tarts, and for playing with. In the Taylorized world, something has been lost and, until it’s found, adding a few case studies to the curriculum at Harvard Business School probably isn’t enough. Neither unions nor businesses have lived up to Brandeis’s optimism. “If the fruits of Scientific Management are directed into the proper channels,” he wrote, “the workingman will get not only a fair share, but a very large share, of the industrial profits arising from improved industry.” Lately, that share has been going to shareholders and C.E.O.s. Home and work, separated since the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution, have been growing back together again: BlackBerry on the nightstand, toaster in the photocopy room. Efficiency was meant to lead to a shorter workday, but, in the final two decades of the twentieth century, the average American added a hundred and sixty-four hours of work in the course of a year; that’s a whole extra month’s time, but not, typically, a month’s worth of either happiness minutes or civic participation. Eating dinner standing up while nursing a baby, making a phone call to the office, and supervising a third grader’s homework is not, I don’t think, the hope of democracy.



Lillian Gilbreth died, of a stroke, in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1972, at the age of ninety-three. She was cremated. The Times ran an obituary headed “Dr. Gilbreth, Engineer, Mother of Dozen.” She had always believed that the world needed “a new philosophy of work.” She never did manage to write it.

The Art of Fiction - Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway writes in the bedroom of his house in the Havana suburb of San Francisco de Paula. He has a special workroom prepared for him in a square tower at the southwest corner of the house, but prefers to work in his bedroom, climbing to the tower room only when “characters” drive him up there.

The bedroom is on the ground floor and connects with the main room of the house. The door between the two is kept ajar by a heavy volume listing and describing The World’s Aircraft Engines. The bedroom is large, sunny, the windows facing east and south letting in the day’s light on white walls and a yellow-tinged tile floor.

The room is divided into two alcoves by a pair of chest-high bookcases that stand out into the room at right angles from opposite walls. A large and low double bed dominates one section, oversized slippers and loafers neatly arranged at the foot, the two bedside tables at the head piled seven-high with books. In the other alcove stands a massive flat-top desk with a chair at either side, its surface an ordered clutter of papers and mementos. Beyond it, at the far end of the room, is an armoire with a leopard skin draped across the top. The other walls are lined with white-painted bookcases from which books overflow to the floor, and are piled on top among old newspapers, bullfight journals, and stacks of letters bound together by rubber bands.

It is on the top of one of these cluttered bookcases—the one against the wall by the east window and three feet or so from his bed—that Hemingway has his “work desk”—a square foot of cramped area hemmed in by books on one side and on the other by a newspaper-covered heap of papers, manuscripts, and pamphlets. There is just enough space left on top of the bookcase for a typewriter, surmounted by a wooden reading board, five or six pencils, and a chunk of copper ore to weight down papers when the wind blows in from the east window.

A working habit he has had from the beginning, Hemingway stands when he writes. He stands in a pair of his oversized loafers on the worn skin of a lesser kudu—the typewriter and the reading board chest-high opposite him.

When Hemingway starts on a project he always begins with a pencil, using the reading board to write on onionskin typewriter paper. He keeps a sheaf of the blank paper on a clipboard to the left of the typewriter, extracting the paper a sheet at a time from under a metal clip that reads “These Must Be Paid.” He places the paper slantwise on the reading board, leans against the board with his left arm, steadying the paper with his hand, and fills the paper with handwriting which through the years has become larger, more boyish, with a paucity of punctuation, very few capitals, and often the period marked with an X. The page completed, he clips it facedown on another clipboard that he places off to the right of the typewriter.

Hemingway shifts to the typewriter, lifting off the reading board, only when the writing is going fast and well, or when the writing is, for him at least, simple: dialogue, for instance.

He keeps track of his daily progress—“so as not to kid myself”—on a large chart made out of the side of a cardboard packing case and set up against the wall under the nose of a mounted gazelle head. The numbers on the chart showing the daily output of words differ from 450, 575, 462, 1250, back to 512, the higher figures on days Hemingway puts in extra work so he won’t feel guilty spending the following day fishing on the Gulf Stream.

A man of habit, Hemingway does not use the perfectly suitable desk in the other alcove. Though it allows more space for writing, it too has its miscellany: stacks of letters; a stuffed toy lion of the type sold in Broadway nighteries; a small burlap bag full of carnivore teeth; shotgun shells; a shoehorn; wood carvings of lion, rhino, two zebras, and a wart-hog—these last set in a neat row across the surface of the desk—and, of course, books: piled on the desk, beside tables, jamming the shelves in indiscriminate order— novels, histories, collections of poetry, drama, essays. A look at their titles shows their variety. On the shelf opposite Hemingway’s knee as he stands up to his “work desk” are Virginia Woolf’s The Common Reader, Ben Ames Williams’s House Divided, The Partisan Reader, Charles A. Beard’s The Republic, Tarle’s Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia, How Young You Look by Peggy Wood, Alden Brooks’s Will Shakespeare and the Dyer’s Hand, Baldwin’s African Hunting, T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems, and two books on General Custer’s fall at the battle of the Little Big Horn.

The room, however, for all the disorder sensed at first sight, indicates on inspection an owner who is basically neat but cannot bear to throw anything away—especially if sentimental value is attached. One bookcase top has an odd assortment of mementos: a giraffe made of wood beads; a little cast-iron turtle; tiny models of a locomotive; two jeeps and a Venetian gondola; a toy bear with a key in its back; a monkey carrying a pair of cymbals; a miniature guitar; and a little tin model of a U.S. Navy biplane (one wheel missing) resting awry on a circular straw place mat—the quality of the collection that of the odds and ends which turn up in a shoebox at the back of a small boy’s closet. It is evident, though, that these tokens have their value, just as three buffalo horns Hemingway keeps in his bedroom have a value dependent not on size but because during the acquiring of them things went badly in the bush, yet ultimately turned out well. “It cheers me up to look at them,” he says.

Hemingway may admit superstitions of this sort, but he prefers not to talk about them, feeling that whatever value they may have can be talked away. He has much the same attitude about writing. Many times during the making of this interview he stressed that the craft of writing should not be tampered with by an excess of scrutiny—“that though there is one part of writing that is solid and you do it no harm by talking about it, the other is fragile, and if you talk about it, the structure cracks and you have nothing.”

As a result, though a wonderful raconteur, a man of rich humor, and possessed of an amazing fund of knowledge on subjects that interest him, Hemingway finds it difficult to talk about writing—not because he has few ideas on the subject, but rather because he feels so strongly that such ideas should remain unexpressed, that to be asked questions on them “spooks” him (to use one of his favorite expressions) to the point where he is almost inarticulate. Many of the replies in this interview he preferred to work out on his reading board. The occasional waspish tone of the answers is also part of this strong feeling that writing is a private, lonely occupation with no need for witnesses until the final work is done.

This dedication to his art may suggest a personality at odds with the rambunctious, carefree, world-wheeling Hemingway-at-play of popular conception. The fact is that Hemingway, while obviously enjoying life, brings an equivalent dedication to everything he does —an outlook that is essentially serious, with a horror of the inaccurate, the fraudulent, the deceptive, the half-baked.

Nowhere is the dedication he gives his art more evident than in the yellow-tiled bedroom where early in the morning Hemingway gets up to stand in absolute concentration in front of his reading board, moving only to shift weight from one foot to another, perspiring heavily when the work is going well, excited as a boy, fretful, miserable when the artistic touch momentarily vanishes—slave of a self-imposed discipline, which lasts until about noon when he takes a knotted walking stick and leaves the house for the swimming pool where he takes his daily half-mile swim.

George Plimpton, 1958

From the Paris Review interview of Hemingway