We know that management is getting work done through others, that strategic plans are overall plans that

clarify how a company will serve customers and position itself against competitors over the next years, and that just-in-time inventory is a system in which the parts needed to make something arrive from suppliers just as they are needed at each stage of production. Todays managers would undoubtedly view those ideas and many of the others presented here as self-evident. For example, tell todays managers to reward workers for improved production or performance, set specific goals to increase motivation, or innovate to create and sustain a competitive advantage, and theyll respond, Duh! Who doesnt know that? A mere 125 years ago, however, business ideas and practices were so different that todays widely accepted management ideas would have been as self-evident as space travel, cell phones, and the Internet. In fact, management jobs and careers didnt exist 125 years ago, so management was not yet a field of study. Now, of course, managers and management are such an important part of the business world that its hard to imagine organizations without them. So if there were no managers 125 years ago, but you cant walk down the hall today without bumping into one, where did management come from?

The Origins of Management

Management as a field of study may be just 125 years old, but management ideas and practices have actually been used from the earliest times of recorded history. For example, 2,500 years before management researchers called it job enrichment, the Greeks learned that they could improve the productivity of boring, repetitious tasks by performing them to music. The basic idea was to use a flute, drum, or song lyrics to pace people to work in unison using the same efficient motions, stimulate them to work faster and longer, and make the boring work more fun. Although we can find the seeds of many of todays management ideas throughout history, not until the last two centuries did systematic changes in the nature of work and organizations create a compelling need for managers.

Management Ideas and Practices throughout History

Examples of management thought and practice can be found throughout history. For example, the earliest recorded instance of information management dates to ancient Sumer (modern Iraq), ca. 80003000 B.C.E. Sumerian businessmen used small clay tokens to calculate quantities of grain and livestock. Different shapes and sizes represented different types and quantities of goods. The tokens were also used to store data. A task as enormous as building the great pyramids in Egypt was bound to present practical problems that would lead to the development of management ideas. Egyptians recognized the need for planning, organizing, and controlling; for submitting written requests; and for consulting staff for advice before making decisions. The enormity of the task they faced is evident in the pyramid of King Khufu, which contains 2.3 million blocks of stone. Each block had to be quarried, cut to precise size and shape, cured (hardened in the sun), transported by boat for 2 to 3 days, moved onto the construction site, numbered to identify where it would be placed, and then shaped and smoothed so that it would fit perfectly into place. The following table shows how other management ideas and practices throughout history relate to the management functions.

Besides the achievements of the Sumerians and Egyptians, we might note the Babylonian King Hammurabi, who established controls by using witnesses and written documents; King Nebuchadnezzar, who over a millennium later pioneered techniques for producing goods and using wages to motivate workers; Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War, who emphasized the importance of strategy and identifying and attacking an opponents weaknesses; the Greek author Xenophon, who recognized management as a distinct and separate art; King Cyrus of Persia, who recognized the importance of human relations and used motion study to eliminate wasteful steps and improve productivity; Cato the Elder, who emphasized the importance of job descriptions; the Roman emperor Diocletian, who mastered the art of delegation by dividing the widespread Roman Empire into 101 provinces grouped into 13 dioceses, which were in turn grouped into four geographic divisions; the medieval Arab scholars al-Farabi and al-Ghazali, who began defining what it takes to be a good leader or manager; Barbarigo, who discussed the different ways in which organizations could be structured; the Venetians, who used numbering and standardization to make parts interchangeable; Sir Thomas More, who emphasized the negative societal consequences associated with poor leadership in his book Utopia; and the Italian philosopher and politician Machiavelli, who wrote about the importance of cohesion, power, and leadership in organizations.

Why We Need Managers Today

Working from 8 am to 5 pm, coffee breaks, lunch hours, crushing rush hour traffic, and punching a time clock are things we associate with todays working world. Work hasnt always been this way, however. In fact, the design of jobs and organizations has changed dramatically over the last 500 years. For most of humankinds history, for example, people didnt commute to work. Work usually occurred in homes or on farms. And because these work groups were small and typically selforganized, there wasnt a strong need for management. During the Industrial Revolution (17501900), however, jobs and organizations changed dramatically. First, unskilled laborers running machines began to replace high-paid, skilled artisans. What made this possible? The availability of power as well as numerous related inventions. . Whereas artisans made entire goods by themselves by hand, this new production system was based on a division of labor: Each worker, interacting with machines, performed separate, highly specialized tasks that were but a small part of all the steps required to make manufactured goods. Mass production was born as rope- and chain-driven assembly lines moved work to stationary workers who concentrated on performing one small task over and over again. While workers focused on their singular tasks, managers were needed to coordinate the different parts of the production system and optimize its overall performance. Second, instead of being performed in fields, homes, or small shops, jobs occurred in large, formal organizations where hundreds, if not thousands, of people worked under one roof. Because the number of people working in manufacturing quintupled from 1860 to 1890, and individual factories employed so many workers under one roof, companies now had a strong need for disciplinary rules to impose order and structure. For the first time, they needed managers who knew how to organize large groups, work with employees, and make good decisions.

The Evolution of Management

Before 1880, business educators taught only basic bookkeeping and secretarial skills. Over the next 25 years, however, things changed dramatically. In 1886, Henry Towne, president of the Yale and Towne Manufacturing Company, presented his ideas about management to the American Society of Engineers. In his talk, entitled The Engineer as Economist, he emphasized that managing people and work processes was just as important as engineering work that focused on machines. Towne also argued that management should be recognized as a separate field of study with its own professional associations, journals, and literature where management ideas could be exchanged and developed.

Scientific Management
Frederick W. Taylor (18561915), is considered the father of scientific management Bosses, who were hired by the company owner or founder, used to make decisions by the seat of their pantshaphazardly, without any systematic study, thought, or collection of information. If the bosses decided that workers should work twice as fast, little or no thought was given to worker motivation. If workers resisted, the bosses often resorted to physical beatings to get workers to work faster, harder, or longer. With no incentives for bosses and workers to cooperate with one another, both groups played the system by trying to take advantage of each other. Moreover, each worker did the same job in his or her own way with different methods and different tools. In short, there were no procedures to standardize operations, no standards by which to judge whether performance was good or bad, and no follow-up to determine if productivity or quality actually improved when changes were made. This all changed, however, with the advent of scientific management, which involved

thorough study and testing of different work methods to identify the best, most efficient ways to complete a job.

These include using systematic analysis to identify the best methods; scientifically selecting, training, and developing workers; promoting cooperation between management and labor; developing standardized approaches and tools; setting specific tasks or goals and then rewarding workers with financial incentives; and giving workers shorter work hours and frequent breaks. In fact, these ideas are so well accepted and widely used that we take most of them for granted.

Bureaucratic and Administrative Management

The field of scientific management developed quickly in the United States between 1895 and 1920 and focused on improving the efficiency of manufacturing facilities and their workers. At about the same time, equally important ideas about bureaucratic and administrative management were developing in Europe. In monarchies, where kings, queens, sultans, and emperors ruled, and patriarchies, where a council of elders, wise men, or male heads of extended families ruled, the top leaders typically achieved their positions by virtue of birthright. For example, when the queen died, her oldest son became king regardless of his intelligence, experience, education, or desire. Likewise, promotion to prominent positions of authority in monarchies and patriarchies was based on who you knew (politics), who you were (heredity), or ancient rules and traditions. Max Weber (18641920) proposed the then new idea of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy comes from the French word bureaucratie. Since bureau means desk or office and cratie or cracy means to rule, bureaucracy literally means to rule from a desk or office. According to Weber, bureaucracy is the exercise of control on the basis of knowledge. Rather than ruling by virtue of favoritism or personal or family connections, people in a bureaucracy would lead by virtue of their rational-legal authorityin other words, their knowledge, expertise, or experience. Furthermore, the aim of bureaucracy is not to protect authority, but to achieve an organizations goals in the most efficient way possible.

Administrative Management
The Frenchman Henri Fayol, whose ideas were shaped by his 20-plus years of experience as a CEO, is best known for developing fi ve management functions (planning, organizing, coordinating, commanding, and controlling) and fourteen principles of management (division of work, authority and responsibility, discipline, unity of command, unity of direction, subordination of individual interests to the general interest, remuneration, centralization, scalar chain, order, equity, stability of tenure of personnel, initiative, and esprit de corps). He is also known for his belief that management can and should be taught to others.

Human Relations Management

As we have seen, scientific management focuses on improving efficiency; bureaucratic management focuses on using knowledge, fairness, and logical rules and procedures; and administrative management focuses on how and what managers should do in their jobs. The human relations approach to management focuses on people, particularly the psychological and social aspects of work. This approach to management sees people not as just extensions of machines but as valuable organizational resources in their own right. Human relations management holds that peoples needs are important and understands that their efforts, motivation, and performance are affected by the work they do and their relationships with their bosses, coworkers, and work groups. In other words, efficiency alone is not enough. Organizational success also depends on treating workers well.

Operations, Information, Systems, and Contingency Management

Operations Management
In general, operations management uses a quantitative or mathematical approach to find ways to increase productivity, improve quality, and manage or reduce costly inventories. The most commonly

used operations management tools and methods are quality control, forecasting techniques, capacity planning, productivity measurement and improvement, linear programming, scheduling systems, inventory systems, work measurement techniques, project management and cost-benefit analysis. Today, with those tools and techniques, we take it for granted that manufactured goods will be made with standardized, interchangeable parts; that the design of those parts will be based on specific, detailed plans; and that manufacturing companies will aggressively manage inventories to keep costs low and increase productivity. These key elements of operations management have some rather strange origins: guns, geometry, and fire.

Information Management
Accurate, timely, relevant, and complete information has been important to businesses throughout history. Consequently, throughout history, organizations have pushed for and quickly adopted new information technologies that reduce the cost or increase the speed with which they can acquire, store, retrieve, or communicate information. The first technologies to truly revolutionize the business use of information were paper and the printing press. As the volume of printed information increased, businesses needed new ways to organize and make sense of it.

Systems Management
Todays companies are much more complex than they used to be. They are larger and employ more people. They most likely manufacture, service, and finance what they sell, not only in their home markets but in foreign markets throughout the world, too. They also operate in complex, fastchanging, competitive, global environments that can quickly turn competitive advantages into competitive disadvantages. How, then, can managers make sense of this complexity, both within and outside their organizations?

Contingency Management
One of the practical implications of the contingency approach to management is that management is much harder than it looks. In fact, because of the clarity and obviousness of management theories (OK, most of them), students and workers often wrongly assume that a companys problems would be quickly and easily solved if management would take just a few simple steps. If this were true, few companies would have problems. A second implication of the contingency approach is that managers need to look for key contingencies that differentiate todays situation or problems from yesterdays situation or problems. Moreover, it means that managers need to spend more time analyzing problems, situations, and employees before taking action to fix them. Finally, it means that as you read this text and learn about management ideas and practices, you need to pay particular attention to qualifying phrases such as usually, in these situations, for this to work, and under these circumstances. Doing so will help you identify the key contingencies that will help you become a better manager.