Schmidt is a character in Principles of Scientific Management by Frederick Winslow Taylor.
[2] He had done so by promising Schmidt a higher rate of pay for a level of output determined by management.
Taylor's example of Schmidt is still taught widely in business and management education.
[4] Taylor recalled the context in his Principles of Scientific Management, his most famous volume to this day:[5] One of the first pieces of work undertaken by us, when the writer started to introduce scientific management into the Bethlehem Steel, was to handle pig iron on task work.
[3]Taylor recalled the selection and test procedures, plus their outcome: Schmidt, are you a high-priced man?
I could load dot pig iron on the car to-morrow for $1.85, and I get it every day, don't I?
I have given considerable study to handling pig iron, and feel sure that you could do a much larger day's work than you have been doing.
Schmidt started to work, and all day long, and at regular intervals, was told by the man who stood over him with a watch, 'Now pick up a pig and walk.
And he practically never failed to work at this pace and do the task that was set him during the three years that the writer was at Bethlehem Steel.
One man after another was picked out and trained to handle pig iron at the rate of 47 tons per day until all of the pig iron was handled at this rate, and the men were receiving 60 per cent.
[3][6] In his Prison Notebooks, Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci attacked Taylor's characterisation of Schmidt's work as so devoid of intellectual content that it could be performed by an 'intelligent gorilla'.
[9] For decades it was unclear whether Schmidt had ever actually been a real person, or whether the experiments had succeeded as Taylor recalled.
[1] This research also revealed that Taylor had unreasonably extrapolated generalised conclusions from his experimental data.
[1][10] The most frequently made comparison with Schmidt is Alexey Stakhanov, who also massively increased his industrial output when suitably motivated.
[11] In his The Business of Genocide, historian Michael Thad Allen compared the sadistic way in which German concentration camp guards treated camp laborers lifting steel girders with the way Taylor had treated Schmidt at Bethlehem.
[12] Some authors have since argued that it does not necessarily matter whether Taylor's 'pig-tail' about Schmidt was entirely true.
[13] Indeed, Taylor became very good at honing and refining his lectures, and audiences remembered them many years later.