Frank and Lillian Gilbreth

tauringhuang.

Sep 5th 2008
From Economist.com

Frank (1868-1924) and Lillian Gilbreth (1878-1972) brought together two of the main streams of management thinking over the past 100 years. On the one hand, they followed the pioneering work in time and motion studies begun by Frederick Winslow Taylor, and on the other they developed the study of workplace psychology. Frank, who began his working life as a bricklayer, closely observed the ways in which different men performed the task and came to conclusions about the most efficient way. In one case he increased the rate of laying bricks from 1,000 a day to 2,700 a day. Lillian wrote a thesis on the psychology of management and her first notable publication, “Psychology in the Workplace”, was serialised in a journal of the Society of Industrial Engineers.

The two subdivided workers’ hand movements into 17 different units, which they called “therbligs” (Gilbreth backwards, except for the t and the h). Doctors to this day owe a debt to them, since it was Frank who first came up with the idea that surgeons should use a nurse as “a caddy” to hand them their instruments as and when they were needed. Previously surgeons had searched for and fetched their own instruments while operating.

The Gilbreths are generally considered as one unit. But Frank married Lillian when he was 36, after he had done much of his time-and-motion work and years after he had set up his own engineering consulting business. He died only 20 years later, after the couple had produced 12 children, who limited the amount of time they had to work together.

Lillian lived on for another 48 years after Frank’s death, continuing to work and give seminars for much of that time. Famously, she travelled to Europe a few days after her husband’s death in 1924 to fulfil a speaking engagement in Prague that he had undertaken. She was a redoubtable woman, forging a career in a discipline—management in the engineering industry—where women were not at the time taken seriously. Often called “the first lady of management”, she was also the first female member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

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In recent years the Gilbreths’ work has largely disappeared from the management canon, with time-and-motion studies mostly associated with Taylor. The couple are best remembered for a book written by two of their 12 children (Ernestine and Frank junior). Called “Cheaper by the Dozen” (first published in 1946), it has been turned into films and TV series that have little to do with the real lives of the Gilbreths, apart from the fact that they had twelve children. And even that was not quite the truth, since one of their children (the second) died of diphtheria when she was only six years old. They never actually had twelve offspring alive at the same time.

The title of the book was taken from the answer Frank is alleged to have given when people asked him how he came to have so many children: “Because they come cheaper by the dozen.”

Lillian Gilbreth was included in the US National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1995