THERE'S always a better way of doing things. That's the essence of the book The One Best Way (1997) by American biographer Robert Kanigel (b. 1946), who described how Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated Scientific Management (Taylorism) or by using methodical means to achieve the maximum labor efficiency in all businesses.

Taylorism is best known when organizations use time-and-motion study or simply 'time study' to define all invisible wastes of time and effort on the part of the workers and managers. For objectivity, time study is usually done by external consultants or efficiency experts who take a work process, time them and total the number of seconds, minutes or hours.