The Management Century: A Critical Review of 20th Century Thought and Practice (Jossey Bass Business & Management Series) - Hardcover

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STUART CRAINER is a UK-based journalist who has been covering the business scene for many years. He is a founder of Suntop Media, a media content, concepts, and consulting firm. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, Across the Board, and Strategy & Business. He is the author of numerous books on business: the Ultimate Series, The Financial Times Handbook of Management, and Gravy Training: Inside the Business of Business Schools (with Des Dearlove), also published by Jossey-Bass.

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"Management has been practiced since the very dawn of civilization. But only during the last one hundred years has it been recognized, analyzed, monitored, taught and formalized," veteran journalist Stuart Crainer writes in The Management Century, his fascinating, lively tour of the theory and practice of management. Over the past one hundred years, Crainer says, the art of management has been reinvented time and time again. In The Man-agement Century, we get to live through each innovation and understand how it fits with the past--and the future.
Crainer shows us that a careful study of the history of management holds vital clues to its future. There are lessons to be learned from early giants such as Henri Fayol, originator of the fourteen general principles of man-agement, and from more contemporary figures such as W. Edwards Deming, the American whose concept of Total Quality Management revolutionized the Japanese auto industry. Decade after decade, Crainer points out, each new trend in management thinking has been shaped by the successes--and shortcomings--of the concepts that preceded it.
The Management Century gives vibrant life to this chronology and pres-ents a rich cast of historic characters any novelist would envy. Including both thinkers and doers, the management innovators Crainer introduces throughout his book are as intriguing as the innovations they championed. These are individuals who, despite personal flaws--sometimes reflecting the biases of their times--made undeniable contributions to corporate and social betterment.
As a new millennium opens, The Management Century offers an in-dispensable read to any student of business and management--those still in school and those who view their entire lives as a learning experience. Read-ers will gain a deeper appreciation for human ingenuity in dealing with the challenges of large organizations. They will realize that the demand for such ingenuity never changes. As Crainer tells us, in management there are no fi-nal answers, just enduring questions.

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"Management has been practiced since the very dawn of civilization. But only during the last one hundred years has it been recognized, analyzed, monitored, taught and formalized," veteran journalist Stuart Crainer writes in The Management Century, his fascinating, lively tour of the theory and practice of management. Over the past one hundred years, Crainer says, the art of management has been reinvented time and time again. In The Man-agement Century, we get to live through each innovation and understand how it fits with the past--and the future. Crainer shows us that a careful study of the history of management holds vital clues to its future. There are lessons to be learned from early giants such as Henri Fayol, originator of the fourteen general principles of man-agement, and from more contemporary figures such as W. Edwards Deming, the American whose concept of Total Quality Management revolutionized the Japanese auto industry. Decade after decade, Crainer points out, each new trAnd in management thinking has been shaped by the successes--and shortcomings--of the concepts that preceded it. The Management Century gives vibrant life to this chronology and pres-ents a rich cast of historic characters any novelist would envy. Including both thinkers and doers, the management innovators Crainer introduces throughout his book are as intriguing as the innovations they championed. These are individuals who, despite personal flaws--sometimes reflecting the biases of their times--made undeniable contributions to corporate and social betterment. As a new millennium opens, The Management Century offers an in-dispensable read to any student of business and management--those still in school and those who view their entire lives as a learning experience. Read-ers will gain a deeper appreciation for human ingenuity in dealing with the challenges of large organizations. They will realize that the demand for such ingenuity never changes. As Crainer tells us, in manage

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Chapter 1: Preface

"What industrialization was to the 19th century, management is to the 20th. Almost unrecognized in 1900, management has become the central activity of our civilization. It employs a high proportion of our educated men and determines the pace and quality of our economic progress, the effectiveness of our government services and the strength of our national defense. The way we "manage," the way we shape our organizations, affects and reflects what our society is becoming." --Fortune, 19661

The last hundred years have witnessed the dramatic genesis of management. Management has emerged as a profession. Management has moved from an unspoken, informal, ad hoc activity into one that is routinely analyzed and commented on from every angle possible. Management has emerged from the shadows to be recognized as one of the driving forces of economic and personal life. Its tentacles spread ever further. Nothing-no organization, no activity-now appears beyond the scope or ambition of management.

While management came of age during the twentieth century, it would be foolish to suggest that it did not exist prior to 1900. Management has been practiced since the very dawn of civilization. But only during the last one hundred years has it been recognized, analyzed, monitored, taught, and formalized. The twentieth century was the management century.

Over this period, management has often been narrowly defined as relating to business. As the great management thinker, Peter Drucker, has pointed out, this does management a disservice. Management applies to more than the world of business. Indeed, Drucker argues that the creation of "city managers" early in the 1900s was one of the first occasions in which management, as it is now understood, was applied to a particular job. Management is as appropriate in local government as it is in a corporation. Management is as much at home in politics and government as it is in health care and hospitals. It is as useful in sports-coaching is just one aspect of management-as it is on the factory floor.

There are, of course, differences in management between different organizations-mission defines strategy, after all, and strategy defines structure. But the differences between managing a chain of retail stores and managing a Roman Catholic diocese are amazingly fewer than either retail executives or bishops realize. The differences are mainly in application rather than in principles. The executives of all these organizations spend, for instance, about the same amount of their time on people problems-and the people problems are almost always the same.

So whether you are managing a software company, a hospital, a bank or a Boy Scout organization, the differences apply to only about 10 percent of your work. This 10 percent is determined by the organization's specific mission, its specific culture, its specific history and its specific vocabulary. The rest is pretty much interchangeable.2

And management is the measure of greatness-both financial and ethical-within organizations. It is no surprise that Berkshire Hathaway chief Warren Buffett invests in well-managed companies. Time and time again, in statements of his investment philosophy, Buffett returns to the issue of sound management. He lauds some of his own managers: "They love their businesses, they think like owners, and they exude integrity and ability."3 The quintessence of Buffett's investment philosophy is that given the right conditions, good managers produce good companies. Never invest in badly managed companies.

Yet management's recognition as a distinctive discipline has been hard-earned. Despite the executive superstars with their superstar salaries, the power and influence clearly enjoyed by managers, and the fact that a huge percentage of the working population work in managerial jobs, management is rarely regarded as the noblest of callings-or as a calling at all. Management is something people fall into. A job in the customer service department leads to marketing and, before you know it, you are vice president and people are asking you the meaning of management.

Saying "Management is-" leads to quizzical silence and furrowed brows whether you are on a factory floor in Nebraska, a Harvard seminar room, or a trading hall in Hong Kong. Similarly, management's standing in society is elusive. Is it deal making, the distrusted art of salesmanship, decision making, paper-shuffling admin, motivation, the science of analysis, budgeting, or the more distinguished art of leadership? All of them and more. "Corporations and managers suffer from a profound social ambivalence," leading theorists Sumantra Ghoshal, Christopher Bartlett, and Peter Moran have observed. "Hero-worshipped by the few, they are deeply distrusted by the many. In popular mythology, the corporate manager is Gordon Gecko, the financier who preaches the gospel of greed in Hollywood's Wall Street. Corporations are 'job killers.'"4

Management has had a bad press. The attraction-and the trouble- is that management is multifaceted. Pinning it down is like nailing Jell-O. It is marketing. It is strategy. It is inspiring people. It is budgeting. It is organizing projects and commitments. It is a complex, highly personal, and now truly global calling.

Given this complexity, it is no surprise that the historical and theoretical strands that go to make up contemporary management are many and varied. The great management thinkers are drawn from a bewildering variety of disciplines and professions-there are economists (such as Harvard Business School's Michael Porter); psychologists (such as Edgar Schein of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology); sociologists (such as Rosabeth Moss Kanter of Harvard Business School); management consultants (such as Bruce Henderson and Marvin Bower); engineers aplenty (from Frederick Taylor to the civil engineering-trained Tom Peters); even a nuclear physicist, clarinet-playing would-be politician Kenichi Ohmae.

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the applicability of lessons from even more fields to management. Orchestra conductors, mariners, football stars, mountaineers, and poets are among those who now routinely address managers. Their message is that their skills, insights, and experience may have a practical use in modern management...

November 1999 Stuart Crainer, Twyford, Berkshire, United Kingdom