According to Taylor, there was always “one best way” to accomplish any given process—and only one way, the standardized way.12 For Taylor, there was nothing worse than a worker trying to do things his own way. “There is a rock upon which many an ingenious man has stranded, that of indulging his inventive faculty,” warned Taylor in a 1918 magazine article. “It is thoroughly illegitimate for the average man to start out to make a radically new machine, or method, or process to replace one which is already successful.”
