Management is there from ___
1. After 1700
2. After 1800
3. After 1900
4. Historical period
Answers
Answer:
Organization as machine – this imagery from our industrial past continues to cast a long shadow over the way we think about management today. It isn’t the only deeply-held and rarely examined notion that affects how organizations are run. Managers still assume that stability is the normal state of affairs and change is the unusual state (a point I particularly challenge in The End of Competitive Advantage). Organizations still emphasize exploitation of existing advantages, driving a short-term orientation that many bemoan. (Short-term thinking has been charged with no less than a chronic decline in innovation capability by Clayton Christensen who termed it “the Capitalist’s Dilemma.”) Corporations continue to focus too narrowly on shareholders, with terrible consequences – even at great companies like IBM.
But even as these old ideas remain in use (and indeed, are still taught), management as it is practiced by the most thoughtful executives evolves. Building on ideas from my colleague Ian MacMillan, I’d propose that we’ve seen three “ages” of management since the industrial revolution, with each putting the emphasis on a different theme: execution, expertise, and empathy.
Prior to the industrial revolution, of course, there wasn’t much “management” at all – meaning, anyone other than the owner of an enterprise handling tasks such as coordination, planning, controlling, rewarding, and resource allocation. Beyond a few kinds of organization – the church, the military, a smattering of large trading, construction, and agricultural endeavors (many unfortunately based on slave labor) – little existed that we would recognize as managerial practice. Only glimmers of what was to come showed up in the work of thinkers such as Adam Smith, with his insight that the division of labor would increase productivity.
With the rise of the industrial revolution, that changed. Along with the new means of production, organizations gained scale. To coordinate these larger organizations, owners needed to depend on others, which economists call “agents” and the rest of us call “managers”. The focus was wholly on execution of mass production, and managerial solutions such as specialization of labor, standardized processes, quality control, workflow planning, and rudimentary accounting were brought to bear. By the early 1900’s, the term “management” was in wide use, and Adam Smith’s ideas came into their own. Others – such as Frederick Winslow Taylor, Frank and Lillian Galbreth, Herbert R. Townes, and Henry L. Gantt – developed theories that emphasized efficiency, lack of variation, consistency of production, and predictability. The goal was to optimize the outputs that could be generated from a specific set of inputs.
It is worth noting that, once they gained that scale, domestically-focused firms enjoyed relatively little competition. In America, there were few challengers to the titans in the production of steel, petroleum products, and food. Optimization therefore made a lot of sense. It is also worth noting that in this era, ownership of capital, which permitted acquisition and expansion of means of production (factories and other systems), was the basis for economic well-being.
Knowledge began accumulating about what worked in organizational management. While schools dedicated specifically to business had been offering classes throughout the 1800s in Europe, the economic juggernaut US gained its first institution of higher education in management with the 1881 founding of the Wharton School. A wealthy industrialist, Joseph Wharton aspired to produce “pillars of the state” whose leadership would extend across business and public life. Other universities followed. The establishment of HBR in 1922 was another milestone, marking progress toward the belief that management was a discipline of growing evidence and evolving theory.
Answer:
Explanation:
17000