Words: 9980
Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 – March 21, 1915) was an American engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. Taylor was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania to a wealthy family. He had intended a university education at Harvard, but ill-health forced him to consider an alternative career.
His eyesight failed and he became an industrial apprentice in the depression of 1873. At Exeter he was influenced by the classification system invented by Melvil Dewey in 1872 (Dewey Decimal System) In 1874 he became an apprentice machinist, learning of factory conditions at the grass-roots level. He qualified as an engineer due to evening study. He introduced time-motion studies in 1881 (with ideas of Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth, strong personalities immortalized in books by their dozen children, such as Cheaper By the Dozen. In 1883 he earned a degree by night study from Stevens Institute of TechnologyHis first attempts at reorganising management was at Bethlehem Steel, which he was forced to leave in 1901 after antagonisms with other managers. He then wrote a book, Shop Management, which did well. Taylor believed that contemporary management was amateurish, and should be studied as a discipline; that workers should co-operate (and hence would not need Trade Unions); and that the best results would come from the partnership between a trained and qualified management and a co-operative and innovative workforce.
Each side needed the other. He is known for coinage of the term scientific management in his article The Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911. However his approach is more often referred to, frequently disparagingly, as Taylorism. He died in Philadelphia. Frederick Winslow Taylor devised a system he called scientific management, a form of industrial engineering that established the organization of work as in Ford’s assembly line.
This discipline, along with the industrial psychology established by others at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electic in the 1920s, moved management theory from early time-and-motion studies to the latest total quality control ideas. Taylor’s ideas, clearly enunciated in his writings, were widely misinterpreted. Employers used time and motion studies simply to extract more work from employees at less pay. Unions condemned speedups and the lack of voice in their work that “Taylorism” gave them. and productivity declined when his principles were simplistically instituted.
Modern management theorists, such as Edward Deming, often credit Taylor, however, with generating the principles upon which they act. Others, such as Juran, though, continue to denigrate his work. Modern theorists generally place more emphasis on worker input and teamwork than was usual in much of Taylor’s time. A careful reading of Taylor’s work will reveal that he placed the worker’s interest as high as the employer’s in his studies, and recognized the importance of the suggestion box, for example, in a machine shop.
He advocated a thorough planning of the job by the management and emphasized the necessity of perfect understanding and co-operation between the management and the workers both for the enlargement of profits and the use of scientific investigation and knowledge in industrial work. He summed up his approach in these words: • Science, not rule of thumb. • Harmony, not discord. • Co-operation, not individualism. • Maximum output, in place of restricted output. • The development of each man to his greatest efficiency and prosperity. 2. Henri Fayol.
Henri Fayol was a neoclassical economic theoretician whose theories in scientific organisation of labour were widely influential in the beginning of 20th century. Often associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor, his theories deal with the organisation of production in the context of a competitive enterprise that has to control its production costs. Fayol was the first to identify the four functions of management: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. He believed that the number of management principles that might help improve an organization’s operation is potentially limitless.
Fayol was a key figure in the turn-of-the-century Classical School of management theory. He saw a manager’s job as: Planning, Organizing, Commanding, Coordinating activities, Controlling performance. Notice that most of these activities are very task-oriented, rather than people-oriented. This is very like Taylor and Scientific Management. Fayol laid down the following principles of organization (he called them principles of management):Henri Fayol wrote down his concepts of administration, based largely on his own management experience.
These 14 principles of management were discussed in detail in his book, General and Industrial Management Specialization of labor. Specializing encourages continuous improvement in skills and the development of improvements in methods. Authority. The right to give orders and the power to exact obedience. Discipline. No slacking, bending of rules. Unity of command. Each employee has one and only one boss. Unity of direction. A single mind generates a single plan and all play their part in that plan. Subordination of Individual Interests. When at work, only work things should be pursued or thought about. Remuneration.
Employees receive fair payment for services, not what the company can get away with. Centralization. Consolidation of management functions. Decisions are made from the top. Scalar Chain (line of authority). Formal chain of command running from top to bottom of the organization, like military Order. All materials and personnel have a prescribed place, and they must remain there. Equity. Equality of treatment (but not necessarily identical treatment)Personnel Tenure. Limited turnover of personnel. Lifetime employment for good workers. Initiative. Thinking out a plan and do what it takes to make it happen. Esprit de corps. 3.
Peter Drucker. Peter Ferdinand Drucker (born November 19, 1909) is a management theorist who created many phrases common in business today. Peter F. Drucker was born in 1909 in the city of Vienna. He remained in Europe where he was born and educated until he was 28. After having banking careers in Germany and England, he went on to seek a career in writing and journalism. It wasn’t until Drucker earned his doctorate in International and Public Law at Frankfurt University in 1931 that he began traveling the world. Drucker left Europe for a variety of reasons. He quoted, “The main problem is Europe has outgrown its social structure.
I don’t know any other reason there hasn’t been an upsurge in vitality” (Forbes). Europe’s organizational problems are what led him to tackle the ultimate topic of his career, the principle science of management. Drucker says, “The manager is the life-giving element in every business. Without his leadership the resources of production remain resources and never become production. ” (Drucker, 1954. pp. 1). In 1942, he published The Future of Industrial Man (Forbes). In the book, he focused on how the social tasks of community and family were shunned from organizations and business enterprises.
The reaction to the book was so profound that in the fall of 1943, General Motors invited Drucker to visit their corporate office and compose an in-depth study of their top management. After viewing GM, Drucker went on to write “Concepts of the Corporation” (Drucker, 1954. pp. 73). He coined the term “intellectual integrity” which means, “Having the ability to see the world as it is, not as you want it to be” (Forbes). In many ways, Drucker can be viewed as a social ecologist. What are Drucker’s predictions for the future? First, he predicts that there will be a backlash against corporate chieftains at the top of the food chain.
Second, he predicts that computers are causing management a great deal of harm by making their work more inwardly focused and discouraging less interaction between outside businesses. Third, online colleges are going to replace physical universities and schools. Finally, he predicts that the giant, most successful companies are going to be hard pressed to attract the best and brightest employees mainly because of the corporate cultures. Instead, they will move to medium / smaller companies with a little more personal recognition. Drucker is identified in today’s culture as a “management guru”.
His teachings are worldly, and his seminars are helping corporate culture adapt into the next century. moved to the United States in 1937. He taught at New York University as Professor of Management from 1950 to 1971. Since 1971 he has been the Clarke Professor of Social Science and Management at Claremont University. He lives in Claremont, California. He has been writing influential works about management since the 1940s. He has written about 30 books, and from 1975 to 1995 he was an editorial columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Now in his nineties, he still consults for businesses and non-profit organizations.
Drucker was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U. S. President George W. Bush on July 9, 2002. He recently founded the Leader to Leader Foundation. His most controversial work is on compensation schemes, in which he said that senior management should not be compensated more than twenty times the lowest paid employees. This made him an enemy of some of the same people who had previously praised him. 4. Mary Parker Follett. Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933) worked as a management and political theorist, introducing such phrases as “conflict resolution”, “authority and power”, and “the task of leadership”.
Mary Parker Follett was concerned with behavioural management. She wrote several books, and had a broad area of interest, including sociology, psychology, political science, and Business administration. In Folletts book ‘The New State’, she professed that groups are very important to the well being of an organisation. She feels that there should be groups for completing most tasks, as being part of a group allows individuals to express themselves, as well as for completion of task, and social (and therefore motivational) reasons.
This conflicts with Taylor’s ideals of a top-down management set up, as Follett’s groups involved workers and managers working together as ‘partners’. Follett occupies a very significant place in the development of thinking and practice around adult and informal education. Her contribution can be seen in three particular arenas. First, her involvement in, and advocacy of, community centers in the first two quarters of the twentieth century did a great deal to establish them as an important social and educational form.
Second, her theorizing around the notions of community, experience and the group, and how these related to the individual and to the political domain broke new ground – and was ‘far ahead of her time’ (Konopka 1958: 29). Follett was also fond of the integration of the interests of the organisation and the employee. Again this opposes Taylor’s top down theory, although Taylor also introduced pay incentives such as the piece rate, which is in fact 6. mutually beneficial, as the more work done, the higher the workers wage, and the higher the companies productivity.
Another way in which Follett’s ideas clashed with Taylor’s is through Power theories. Follett suggested that ‘Power over’ is resorted to only if people will not wait for the longer process of education. She was a strong believer in Power-with, as is demonstrated with her group theories. Although Folletts ideas were generally not accepted during the 1920s and 30s, she has increased in popularity recently, and therefore is another contributing factor to the demise of Scientific Management. Believed in Groups, with employees and supervisors working together. Thought that Power with is more appropriate than power over.
Integration of interests between employee and organisation is needed. Theories directly opposed Scientific Management. 5. Frederick Hertzberg. Frederick Herzberg (1923 – 2000) proposed the Two Factor theory of human motivation. According to his theory people were influenced by two factors. Satisfaction and psychological growth was a factor of motivation factors. Dissatisfaction was a result of hygiene factors. Essentially, hygiene factors were needed to ensure an employee was not dissatisfied. In order to motivate an employee into higher performance motivation factors were needed.
Some of his fellow psychologist don’t agree with his work, arguing that Herzberg used faulty methodology. Hygiene Factors include, Working conditions, Salary, Status, Security, interpersonal relations, Motivation Factors Include, Achievement, Achievement Recognition, Responsibility, Advancement, Growth. The combination of hygiene and motivation factors can result in four conditions. High Hygiene / High Motivation: The ideal situation where employees are highly motivated and have few complaints High Hygiene / Low Motivation: Employees have few complaints but are not highly motivated. The job is a paycheck” situation Low Hygiene / High Motivation: Employees are motivated but have a lot of complaints. A situation where the job is exciting and challenging but salaries and work conditions are not up to par. Low Hygiene / Low Motivation: The worst situation. Unmotivated employees with lots of complaints. 6. Matthew Boulton. Matthew Boulton (September 3, 1728–18 August 1809), English manufacturer and engineer, was born at Birmingham, where his father, Matthew Boulton the elder, was a manufacturer of metal articles of various kinds.
To this business he succeeded on his father’s death in 1759. He went into partnership with John Fothergill and in consequence of the growth of their business removed his works in 1762 from Snowhill to what was then a tract of barren heath at Soho, 2 miles north of Birmingham. Here he undertook the manufacture of artistic objects in metal, as well as the reproduction of oil paintings by a mechanical process in which he was associated with Francis Eginton (1737-1805), who subsequently achieved a reputation as a worker in stained or enamelled glass. In this he was also encouraged by Robert Adam.
Between 1762 and 1775 he established a strong reputation as a craftsmen; his works at Soho were widely known for excellent and artistic workmanship. About 1767, Boulton, who was finding the need of improving the power supply for his machinery, made the acquaintance of James Watt, who on his side appreciated the advantages offered by the Soho works for the development of his steam-engine. In 1772 Watt’s partner, Dr John Roebuck, got into financial difficulties, and Boulton, to whom he owed ? 1200, accepted the two-thirds share in Watt’s patent held by him in satisfaction of the debt.
Three years later Boulton and Watt formally entered into partnership, and it was mainly through the energy and self-sacrifice of the former, who devoted all the capital he possessed or could borrow to the enterprise, that the steam engine was at length made a commercial success. It was also owing to Boulton that in 1775 an act of parliament was obtained extending the term of Watt’s 1769 patent to 1799. In 1800 the two partners retired from the business, which they handed over to their sons, Matthew Robinson Boulton and James Watt junior.
In 1788 Boulton turned his attention to coining machinery, and erected at Soho a complete plant with which he struck coins for the Sierra Leone and East India companies and for Russia, and in 1797 produced a new copper coinage for Britain. In 1797 he took out a patent in connection with raising water on the principle of the hydraulic ram. He died at Birmingham on August 18 1809. Boulton was a key member of the Lunar Society. His home, Soho House, is now a museum. 7. Gary Hamel. The opinionated, sometimes acerbic, voice of contemporary strategy, Gary Hamel (b. 954) is co-author of Competing for the Future and, more recently, Leading the Revolution (2000). He is a graduate of Andrews University (1975) and the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan (1990). Hamel is an American management expert. He is a founder of Strategos, an international management consulting firm based in Chicago. His academic standing took a dent soon after publication of the hardback version of Leading the Revolution, in which he had written a very positive profile of Enron.
Following the strong reception of Leading the Revolution, Hamel began work on resilience in business strategy. He wrote of the concept in a 2003 Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Quest for Resilience”. Hamel looks set to match Michael Porter’s achievements, combining intellectual vigor and empire building zeal. He lists his most meaningful achievement as “finding a group of people crazy enough and who care enough to start company committed to upsizing rather than downsizing”. Perhaps, but Hamel also brings aphoristic energy to the turgid world of management writing.
Leading the Revolution includes such bon mots as “get off the treadmill of incrementation”, “heretics not prophets create revolutions” and “You can’t use an old map to find new land. ” Not Jane Austen. Hamel is a visiting professor at Harvard Business School and London Business School. California-based Hamel is also a consultant to major companies and chairman of Strategos, a worldwide strategic consulting company. Strategos proclaims that it is “dedicated to helping its clients get to the future first”.
It runs the Strategos Institute – a “client-sponsored multi-disciplinary research program” – and the Strategos Practice – “a partner not a consulting company”. The selling point is the quality of the ideas and access to big hitting intellectuals – its clients include Royal Dutch/Shell, Emerson Electric and Nokia. The Wall Street Journal in 2008 has ranked Gary Hamel as one of the world’s most influential business thinkers, and Fortune magazine has called him “the world’s leading expert on business strategy Hamel argues that complacency and cynicism are endemic. Dilbert is the bestselling business book of all time. 8. Herbert A Simon. Herbert Simon (June 15, 1916–February 9, 2001) was a researcher in the fields of cognitive psychology, computer science, economics and philosophy (sometimes described as a polymath). He was awarded the ACM’s A. M. Turing Award along with Allen Newell in 1975 for making “basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing. In 1978 he was awarded The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel “for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations”. He invented the terms bounded rationality and satisficing. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1916. He received a bachelor’s degree in 1936 from the University of Chicago. After earning a Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago in 1942, he had positions at Berkeley and the Illinois Institute of Technology.
From 1949 until his death, Simon served on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon University, pioneering the quantitative modeling of human behavior through research in a variety of fields. Simon was a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence, creating with Allen Newell the Logic Theory Machine (1956) and the General Problem Solver (GPS) (1957) programs. GPS was possibly the first method of separating problem solving strategy from information about particular problems. Both programs were developed using the Information Processing Language (1956) developed by Newell, Cliff Shaw and Simon.
He was awarded the ACM’s A. M. Turing Award along with Allen Newell in 1975 for “In joint scientific efforts extending over twenty years, initially in collaboration with J. C. (Cliff) Shaw at the RAND Corporation, and subsequentially with numerous faculty and student colleagues at Carnegie-Mellon University, they have made basic contributions to artificial intelligence, the psychology of human cognition, and list processing. ” While living in Pittsburgh, PA, he advised the citizenry on various issues including the use of public funds to build stadiums and the method of raising tax revenue.
Simon emphasized the usefulness of the land tax, reflecting the early influence of Henry George on his economic thought. 9. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher. Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (February 17, 1890–July 29, 1962) was an extraordinarily talented evolutionary biologist, geneticist and statistician. He has been described by Richard Dawkins as “The greatest of Darwin’s successors,” and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said “Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science. ” Contributions to statistics.
Fisher invented the techniques of maximum likelihood and analysis of variance, was a pioneer in the design of experiments, and originated the concepts of sufficiency, ancillarity, and Fisher information, making him a major figure in 20th century statistics. His article “On a distribution yielding the error functions of several well known statistics” presented Karl Pearson’s chi-squared and Student’s t in the same framework as the normal distribution and his own analysis of variance distribution z. Fisher’s book Statistical methods for research workers showed how to use these distributions.
See also Fisher’s linear discriminator. Fisher information. He introduced the concept of Fisher information in 1925, many years before Shannon’s notion of entropy. Fisher information has been the subject of renewed interest in the last few years, both due to the growth of Bayesian inference in AI, and due to B. Roy Frieden’s book Physics from Fisher Information, which attempts to derive the laws of physics from a Fisherian starting point. 10. Michael Porter. Michael Porter (b. 1947) is the benchmark: someone with high academic credibility who has managed to create a successful business.
But, Porter was always destined to over-achieve – an aeronautical engineer, economist, best-selling author and one of Harvard’s youngest tenured professors. Porter’s genius has lain in producing brilliantly researched and cogent models of competitiveness at a corporate, industry-wide and national level. He is a leading authority on company strategy and the competitiveness of nations and regions. Michael Porter’s work is recognized in many governments, corporations and academic circles globally. He chairs Harvard Business School’s program dedicated for newly appointed CEOs of very large corporations.
He took an industrial economics framework – the Structure-conduct performance paradigm (SCP) – and translated it into the context of business strategy. From this. emerged his best known model: the five forces framework. His books include Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors (1980 Competitive Advantage (1985 The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990 and, most recently, Can Japan Compete? (with Hirotaka Takeuchi and Mariko Sakakibara, 2000). Porter launched his own consulting business Monitor in 1983. Porter was one of the first gurus to refer to himself as a brand.
He has managed that brand carefully. His brand made up of his academic reputation, best-selling books, high credibility – is the cornerstone of the business; but it isn’t all of the business. Monitor basically allows Porter to do what he wants. He closes deals and maximizes his appearances. In October 2002, for example, Porter was invited by the government of the UK to prepare a report on UK competitiveness. He delivered his verdict early in 2003. Michael Porter is the author of 18 books and numerous articles including Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage, Competitive Advantage of Nations, and On Competition.
A six-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article of the year, Professor Porter is the most cited author in business and economics. Michael Porter’s core field is competition and company strategy. He is generally recognized as the father of the modern strategy field, and his ideas are taught in virtually every business school in the world. His work has also re-defined thinking about competitiveness, economic development, economically distressed urban communities, environmental policy, and the role of corporations in society.
His main academic objectives focus on how a firm or a region can build a competitive advantage and develop competitive strategy. He is also a Fellow Member of the Strategic Management Society. One of his most significant contributions is the five forces. Porter’s strategic system consists primarily of:Porter’s five forces framework is part of every MBA program and is b-school fodder. Every five forces flip chart is an ad for Monitor. At a macro level, Monitor’s clients have included AT&T and it was involved in Sears’ ill-fated move into “everyday low pricing”.
A day with Michael Porter in the flesh would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. One ranking put Monitor as the 49th biggest consulting firm in the world – just behind Perot Systems. 11. Merton Howard Miller. Merton Howard Miller (May 16, 1923 – June 3, 2000) won the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1990, along with Harry Markowitz and William Sharpe. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He worked during World War II as an economist in the division of tax research of the Treasury Department, and received a Ph. D. n economics from Johns Hopkins University, 1952. In 1958, he collaborated with Franco Modigliani to write a paper on “The Cost of Capital, Corporate Finance and the Theory of Investment. ” This paper urged a fundamental objection to the traditional view of corporate finance, according to which a corporation can reduce its cost of capital by finding the right debt-to-equity ratio. According to Miller-Modigliani, on the other hand, there is no right ratio, so corporate managers should seek to minimize tax liability and maximize corporate net wealth, letting the debt ratio chips fall where they will.
The way in which they arrived at this conclusion made use of the “no arbitrage” argument, i. e. the premise that any state of affairs that will allow traders of any market instrument to create a riskless money machine will almost immediately disappear. They set the pattern for many arguments based on that premise in subsequent years. Mr. Miller wrote or co-authored eight books. He was a made a fellow of the Econometric Society in 1975 and was president of the American Finance Association in 1976. He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business from 1961 until his retirement in 1993.
He served as a public director on the Chicago Board of Trade 1983-85 and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange from 1990 until his death, in Chicago. 12. Robert Owen. Robert Owen (May 14, 1771–November 17, 1858) was a Welsh social reformer. He is considered the “Father” of the cooperative movement. He was born at Newtown, Montgomeryshire, in mid Wales, where his father had a small business as a saddler and ironmonger, and there young Owen received all his school education, which terminated at the age of nine. After serving in a draper’s shop for some years he settled in Manchester. He very rapidly gained success.
When only nineteen years of age he became manager of a cotton mill employing five hundred people, and by his administrative intelligence and energy soon made it one of the best establishments of the kind in Great Britain. In this factory, Owen used the first bags of American sea-island cotton ever imported into the country; it was the first sea-island cotton from the Southern States. Owen also made remarkable improvement in the quality of the cotton spun; and indeed there is no reason to doubt that at this early age he was the first cotton-spinner in England, a position entirely due to his own capacity and knowledge of the trade.
In 1794 or 1795 he became manager and one of the partners of the Chorlton Twist Company at Manchester. During a visit to Glasgow he had fallen in love with the daughter of the proprietor of the New Lanark mills, David Dale. Owen induced his partners to purchase New Lanark; and after his marriage with Miss Dale he settled there, as manager and part owner of the mills (1800). Encouraged by his great success in the management of cotton factories in Manchester, he had already formed the intention of conducting New Lanark on higher principles than the current commercial ones.
The factory of New Lanark had been started in 1784 by Dale and Richard Arkwright, the water-power afforded by the falls of the Clyde providing the great attraction. About two thousand people had associations with the mills, five hundred of whom were children, brought, most of them, at the age of five or six from the poorhouses and charities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. The children especially had been well treated by Dale, but the general condition of the people was very unsatisfactory.
Many of them were the lowest of the population, the respectable country people refusing to submit to the long hours and demoralizing drudgery of the factories; theft, drunkenness, and other vices were common; education and sanitation were alike neglected; most families lived only in one room. This population, thus committed to his care, Owen now set himself to elevate and ameliorate. He greatly improved their houses, and by the unsparing and benevolent exertion of his personal influence trained them to habits of order, cleanliness and thrift.
He opened a store, where the people could buy goods of the soundest quality at little more than cost price; and placed the sale of drink under the strictest supervision. His greatest success, however, was in the education of the young, to which he devoted special attention. He was the founder of infant schools in Great Britain; and, though he was anticipated by reformers on the continent of Europe, he seems to have been led to institute them by his own views of what education ought to be, and without hint from abroad. In all these plans Owen obtained the most gratifying success.
Though at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, he soon won the confidence of his people. The mills continued to have great commercial success, but needless to say some of Owen’s schemes involved considerable expense, which displeased his partners. Tired at last of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wished to conduct the business on the ordinary principles, Owen formed a new firm, who, content with 5% of return for their capital, were ready to give freer scope to his philanthropy (1813). In this firm Jeremy Bentham and the well-known Quaker, William Allen, were partners.
In the same year Owen first appeared as an author of essays, in which he expounded the principles on which his system of educational philanthropy was based. The chief points in this philosophy were that man’s character is made not by him but for him; that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control ; that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame – these principles leading up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man’s character is to place him under the proper influences – physical, moral and social – from his earliest years.
These principles – of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences – form the keynote of Owen’s whole system of education and social amelioration. As we have said, they are embodied in his first work, A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, the first of these essays (there are four in all) appearing in 1813. Needless to say, Owen’s new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them. 13. Tom Peters. Irrepressible and charismatic, Tom Peters (b. 942) virtually invented the modern guru whirl single handed. His initial impact came through In Search of Excellence (1982), though his most powerful book is Liberation Management (1992). Recent work appears a falling off, but he remains a messianic performer. Peters was born and brought up near Baltimore. He studied engineering at Cornell University and served in Vietnam. He also worked for the drug enforcement agency in Washington. Peters has an MBA and Ph. D from Stanford where he encountered a number of influential figures including Gene Webb and Harold Leavitt.
After Stanford he joined the consultancy firm, McKinsey & Company. He left the firm (prior to the publication of In Search of Excellence) to work independently. Peters’ critics suggest that while he may have raised awareness, he has done so in a superficial way. He has pandered to the masses. Though his messages are often hard hitting they are overly adorned with empty phrase making – ‘yesterday’s behemoths are out of step with tomorrow’s madcap marketplace’- and with insufficient attention to the details of implementation. And, over the years, the message has been radically overhauled.
Tom Peters’ ideas have been refined, popularized and, in many cases, entirely changed. What he celebrates today is liable to be dismissed in his next book. His critics suggest that Tom Peters vacillates as readily as he pontificates. The volume remains loud – even if it is simply typographical. Peters’ latest book is The Brand You 50. (1999) which includes the usual breathless exhortations — “90+ per cent of White Collar Jobs will be totally reinvented/reconceived in the next decade”, “You are Your Rolodex”, “Work on your Optimism” and, simply, “Sell. SELL. SELL!!! “. The forthcoming book Re-imagine! 2003) boldly proclaims that it is “a call to arms — a passionate wake-up call for the business world, educators, and society as a whole. ” In his more recent books, Peters has encouraged personal responsibility in response to the “New Economy”. Quoting from his book, Talent: Develop It, Sell It, Be It: “The harsh news: This Is Not Optional. The microchip will colonize all rote activities. And we will have to scramble to reinvent ourselves – as we did when we came off the farm and went into the factory, and then as we were ejected from the factory and delivered to the white-collar towers.
The exciting news (as I see it anyway): This Is Not Optional. The reinvented you and the reinvented me will have no choice but to scramble and add value in some meaningful way. ” Peters’ business record is mixed. The Tom Peters Group has generally proved a failure. It has largely failed to cash in on Peters’ brand. It started off as a consulting business then metamorphosed into a commercial pot-pourri. Now, more encouragingly, Peters has reinvented himself as tompeters. com and the plaudits are rolling in once again. 14. Sir Walter Scott.
Sir Walter Scott (August 14, 1771 – September 21, 1832) was a prolific Scottish historical novelist popular throughout Europe. Born in Edinburgh in 1771, the young Walter Scott survived a childhood bout of polio that would leave him lame in his right leg for the rest of his life. He learned by heart James Macpherson’s Ossian poems, which it was claimed at the time were translations dating back to the Dark Ages, but later discredited when this was found to be untrue. After studying law at Edinburgh University, he followed in his father’s footsteps and became a lawyer in his native Scotland.
Beginning at age 25 he started dabbling in writing, first translating works from German then moving on to poetry. In between these two phases of his literary career, he published a three-volume set of collected Scottish ballads, The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. This was the first sign of his interest in Scotland and history from a literary standpoint. In 1797 he married Charlotte Carpenter, with whom he had five children. After Scott had founded a printing press, his poetry, beginning with The Lay of the Last Minstrel in 1805, brought him fame.
He published a number of other poems over the next ten years, including in 1810 the popular Lady of the Lake set in the Trossachs, portions of which (translated into German) were set to music by Franz Schubert. One of these songs, Ellens dritter Gesang, is popularly called “Schubert’s Ave Maria”. Another work from this time period, Marmion, produced some of his most quoted (and most often mis-attributed) lines. Canto VI. Stanza 17 reads: Yet Clare’s sharp questions must I shun, Must separate Constance from the nun Oh! what a tangled web we weave When first we practise to deceive! A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye; When the press became embroiled in pecuniary difficulties, Scott set out, in 1814, to write a cash-cow. The result was Waverley, a novel which did not name its author. It was a tale of the last Jacobite rebellion in the United Kingdom, the “Forty-Five”, and the novel met with considerable success. There followed a large set of novels in next five years, each the same general vein. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, he maintained the anonymous habit he had begun with Waverley, always publishing the novels under the name “Author of Waverley” or attributed as “Tales of… with no author. Even when it was clear that there would be no harm in coming out into the open he maintained the facade, apparently out of a sense of fun. During this time the nickname “The Wizard of the North” was popularly applied to the mysterious best-selling writer. His identity as the author of the novels was widely rumoured, and in 1815 Scott was given the honour of dining with George, Prince Regent, who wanted to meet “the author of Waverley”. In 1820 he broke away from writing about Scotland with Ivanhoe, a historical romance set in 12th-century England.
It too was a runaway success and, as he did with his first novel, he unleashed a slew of books along the same lines. As his fame grew during this phase of his career, he was granted the title of baronet, becoming Sir Walter Scott. At this time he organised the visit of King George IV to Scotland, and when the King visited Edinburgh in 1822 the spectacular pageantry Scott had concocted to portray George as a rather tubby reincarnation of Bonnie Prince Charlie made tartans and kilts fashionable and turned them into symbols of national identity.
Beginning in 1825 he went into dire financial straits again, as his company nearly collapsed. That he was the author of his novels became general knowledge at this time as well. Rather than declare bankruptcy he placed his home, Abbotsford House, and income into a trust belonging to his creditors, and proceeded to write his way out of debt. He kept up his prodigious output of fiction (as well as producing a non-fiction biography of Napoleon Bonaparte) through 1831. By then his health was failing, and he died at Abbotsford in 1832.
Though not in the clear by then, his novels continued to sell, and he made good his debts from beyond the grave. He was buried in Dryburgh Abbey where nearby, fittingly, a large statue can be found of William Wallace—one of Scotland’s most romantic historical figures. Scott was responsible for two major trends that carry on to this day. First, he popularized the historical novel; an enormous number of imitators (and imitators of imitators) would appear in the 19th century. It is a measure of Scott’s influence that Edinburgh’s central railway station, opened in 1854, is called Waverley Station.
Second, his Scottish novels rehabilitated Highland culture after years in the shadows following the Jacobite rebellions. It is worth noting, however, that Scott was a Lowland Scot, and that his re-creations of the Highlands were more than a little fanciful. It is known that he invented many clan tartans out of whole cloth, so to speak, for the visit by George IV to Scotland in 1822. Nevertheless, even though he is less popular in these days, the echoes of Waverley and its sequels reverberate still.
Scott was also responsible, through a series of pseudonymous letters published in the Edinburgh Weekly News in 1826, for retaining the right of Scottish banks to issue their own banknotes, which is reflected to this day by his continued appearance on the front of all notes issued by the Bank of Scotland. 15. Adam Smith. Adam Smith (1723–July 17, 1790) was a Scottish political economist and moral philosopher. His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was one of the earliest attempts to study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe.
That work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade and capitalism. Smith was the son of the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723, his father having died some six months previously. At around the age of 4, he was kidnapped by a band of Gypsies, but he was quickly rescued by his uncle and returned to his mother.
Smith’s biographer, John Rae, commented wryly that he feared Smith would have made “a poor Gypsy. ” At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to the University of Glasgow, studying moral philosophy under “the never-to-be-forgotten” (as Smith called him) Francis Hutcheson. In 1740 he entered the Balliol College of the University of Oxford, but as William Robert Scott has said, “the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what was to be his lifework,” and he left the university in 1746. In 1748 he began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames.
Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but later he took up the subject of “the progress of opulence,” and it was then, in his middle or late 20s, that he first expounded the economic philosophy of “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” which he was later to proclaim to the world in his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. About 1750 he met David Hume, who became one of the closest of his many friends. In 1751 Smith was appointed professor on logic at the University of Glasgow, transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy.
His lectures covered the fields of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, political economy, and “police and revenue. ” In 1759 he published his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying some of his Glasgow lectures. This work, which established Smith’s reputation in his day, was concerned with the how human communication depends on sympathy between speaker and listener. He bases his explanation, not as the third Lord Shaftesbury and Hutcheson had done, on a special “moral sense”, nor (like Hume) on utility, but on sympathy.
Smith now began to give more attention to jurisprudence and economics in his lecture and less to his theories of morals. An impression can be obtained as to the development of his ideas on political economy from the notes of his lectures taken down by a student in about 1763 which were later edited by E. Cannan (Lectures on Justice, Police, Revenue and Arms, 1896), and from what Scott, its discoverer and publisher, describes as “An Early Draft of Part of The Wealth of Nations”, which he dates about 1763. At the end of 1763 Smith obtained a lucrative post as tutor to the young duke of Buccleuch and resigned his professorship.
From 1764-66 he traveled with his pupil, mostly in France, where he came to know such intellectual leaders as Anne Turgot, Jean D’Alembert, Andre Morellet, Helvetius and, in particular, Francois Quesnay, the head of the Physiocratic school whose work he much respected. On returning home to Kirkcaldy he devoted much of the next ten years to his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which appeared in 1776. It was very well-received and popular, and Smith became famous. In 1778 he was appointed to a comfortable post as commissioner of customs in Scotland and went to live with his mother in Edinburgh.
He died there on July 17, 1790, after a painful illness. He had apparently devoted a considerable part of his income to numerous secret acts of charity. He neither married nor fathered children. 16. James Watt. James Watt (January 19, 1736–August 19, 1819) was a Scottish mathematician and engineer whose improvements to the steam engine were a key stage in the Industrial Revolution. He was born in Greenock, Scotland, and lived and worked in Birmingham, England. He was a key member of the Lunar Society. Many of his papers are in Birmingham Central Library.
Watt adopted the centrifugal governor to regulate the speed of a steam engine. (This was already in use for governing wind and watermills. ) He invented the parallel motion linkage to convert circular motion to an approximate straight line motion (of which he was most proud) and the steam indicator to measure steam pressure in the cylinder throughout the working cycle of the engine, so showing its efficiency. Watt greatly helped the development of the embryonic steam engine into a viable and economic means of power generation.
He realised that the Newcomen steam engine was wasting nearly three quarters of the steam energy in heating the piston and chamber. Watt developed a separate condenser chamber which significantly increased the efficiency. Further refinements (insulation of the steam cylinder, the double-acting engine, a counter, an indicator, and a throttle valve) made the steam engine his life’s work. Watt was opposed to the use of high pressure steam, and is held by some to have held back the technical development of the steam engine by other engineers, until his patents expired in 1800.
With his partner Matthew Boulton he battled against rival engineers such as Jonathan Hornblower who tried to develop engines which did not fall foul of his ‘catch-all’ patents. Boulton proved an excellent businessman, and both men eventually made fortunes. He introduced a unit called the horsepower to compare the power output of steam engines, his version of the unit being equivalent to 550 foot-pounds per second (about 745. 7 watts). Watt also invented several other things, not least a copying device for letters.
Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor and manufacturer who is credited with creating the first cotton gin in 1793. The cotton gin was a mechanical device which removed the seeds from cotton, a process which was until that time extremely labor-intensive. On January 6, 1817 Whitney married Henrietta Edwards and they had four children. Whitney’s greatest contribution to American industry was the development and implementation of the American System of manufacturing and the assembly line, which he was the first to use when producing muskets for the U.
S. Government. Whitney’s concepts were later exploited by Henry Ford and others in manufacturing. There exists question today over whether the cotton gin, which Whitney received a patent for on March 14, 1794, and its constituent elements should rightly be attributed to Eli Whitney; some contend that Catherine Littlefield Greene should be credited with the invention of the cotton gin, or at least its conception. It is known that she associated with Eli Whitney (along with other historical figures such as George and Martha Washington).
Some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development. Born in Westborough, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale College in 1792. While his ideas were innovative and useful, they were so easy to understand and reproduce that the concepts and designs were readily duplicated by others. Whitney’s company that produced cotton gins went out of business in 1797. He never patented his later inventions, one of which was a milling machine. 7. Henry Mintzberg. Henry Mintzberg (born in Montreal, September 2, 1939) is an internationally renowned academic and author on business and management. He is currently the Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where he has been teaching since 1968, after earning his Master’s degree in Management and Ph. D. from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1965 and 1968 respectively. His undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering was from McGill University.
From 1991 to 1999, he was a visiting professor at INSEAD. Henry Mintzberg writes prolifically on the topics of management and business strategy, with more than 150 articles and fifteen books to his name. His seminal book, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (Mintzberg 1994), criticizes some of the practices of strategic planning today. There is more to Henry Mintzberg than strategy. Witness his latest book: Why I Hate Flying, a brilliantly sardonic look at management in the airline industry. Next in line is a book exploring management education, one of Mintzberg’s longest held bugbears.
Indeed, as befits an iconoclast, a common theme throughout Mintzberg’s career has been a willingness to bite the hand that feeds him. For a man. employed by two business schools – Montreal’s McGill and France’s INSEAD – he has proved a relentless thorn in the side of conventional b-school education. The fruit of his dissatisfaction was the International Masters Program in Management, a thoroughly global program which encourages managers to break free of the limitations of functional, and other, perspectives.
His career began with his PhD research which saw him examining what managers actually did. Hardly rocket science, but a strangely unusual strategy. The result was The Nature of Managerial Work (1973) was the result – one of the few (very few) books which actually examines what managers do rather than discussing what they should do. Since then, Mintzberg has set the agenda in the sphere of strategic management with a combination of academic rigour and a devotion to seeking out new perspectives which has generally set him apart from his contemporaries.
This reached a climax with the publication of The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, a coherent tour-de-force which sounded the death knell for the strategic orthodoxy which had long dominated management thinking and education. His most recent strategy book is Strategy Safari. Mintzberg is working on his next book Developing Managers, Not MBAs. No doubt the book will include more of Mintzberg’s forthright opinions on the subject as expressed in a recent interview: “I think every MBA should have a skull and crossbones stamped on their forehead and underneath should be written: “Warning: not prepared to manage. Mintzberg runs two programs which have been designed to teach his alternative approach to management and strategic planning at McGill University: the International Masters in Practicing Management (I. M. P. M. ) in association with the McGill Executive Institute and the International Masters for Health Leadership (I. M. H. L. ). With Phil LeNir, he owns Coaching Ourselves International, a private company using his alternative approach for management development directly in the workplace. 18. Rosabeth Moss Kanter. Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born 1943) is a tenured professor in business at Harvard Business School, where she holds the Ernest L.
Arbuckle Professorship. In the 2007-2008 Academic school year, she taught a course to MBA students entitled Managing Change. A 1967 Ph. D graduate of the University of Michigan, she has written numerous books on business management techniques, particularly change management. She also has a regular column in the Miami Herald. She is known for her classic 1977 study of tokenism – how being a minority in a group can affect one’s performance due to enhanced visibility and performance pressure. Her study of men and women of the corporation also became a classic in critical management studies and bureaucracy analysis.
Kanter was #11 in a 2000s survey of Top 50 Business Intellectuals by citation in several sources. Rosabeth Moss Kanter is a Harvard Business School professor, bestselling author and ex-editor of the Harvard Business Review. She came to prominence with Change Masters – accurately dubbed a thinking person’s In Search of Excellence. Kanter’s is a sociologist at heart and retains a strong interest in utopian communities – this is most recently express in her co-authorship of Common Interest, Common Good : Creating Value Through Business and Social Sector Partnerships (1999)Her most recent book delights in the worryingly-cliched title, E-volve! 2001) and provides Kanter’s determinedly humanistic take on what it takes to succeed and thrive in the new economy featuring companies such as e-Bay and CNBC. com. Commercially, Kanter runs the decidedly low key Goodmeasure. Founded in 1977, by Kanter and Barry Stein, Boston-based Goodmeasure is a consulting, training and research company. It also has a Speaker’s Bureau — top attraction: RM Kanter. Kanter treads the guru boards, carries out academic work and retains high credibility.
There is the strong impression that she hasn’t mortgaged her soul to mammon but picks and chooses. Moss Kanter has received 23 honorary doctoral degrees, as well as numerous leadership awards and prizes for her books and articles; for example, her book The Change Masters was named one of the most influential business books of the 20th century (Financial Times). Through Goodmeasure Inc. , the consulting group she co-founded, she has partnered with IBM on applying her leadership tools from business to other sectors; she is a Senior Advisor for IBM’s Global Citizenship portfolio.
She advises CEOs of large and small companies, has served on numerous business and non-profit boards including City Year, the urban “Peace Corps” now focused on addressing the school dropout crisis, and national or regional commissions including the Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors. She speaks widely, often sharing the platform with Presidents, Prime Ministers, and CEOs at national and international events, such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Before joining the Harvard Business School faculty, she held tenured professorships at Yale University and Brandeis University and was a Fellow at Harvard Law School, simultaneously holding a Guggenheim Fellowship. 19. Max Weber. Max Weber was a German sociologist who first used the word bureaucracy to describe a particular form of management structure. He proposed a structure that was to provide maximal efficiency and stability. The six key elements of this were: 1. A hierarchical structure that has a clear chain of command with the higher positions having control over the lower positions. 2.
Each employee was to have the expertise to complete a particular task. Labor available was divided and there was specialization of skills. 3. All decisions and situations that could arise were to be governed by a complete and binding set of rules. 4. The relationships between management and employees were to be impersonal. (Impersonality) 5. The recruitment and selection process was to be based around the applicants’ technical competence for the particular job or task he is to perform. 6. Managers were to be viewed as having professional careers rather than being just owners in the company.
Bureaucracy became the accepted form of management structure in large public organizations, many semi state bodies and the civil service. The hierarchical structure allowed the development of a chain of command. The idea of a management career meant that the company gained continuity, efficiency was increased by the strict rules applied, a formal selection process gave recognition to merit and the division of labor also increased efficiency as expertise increase with repetition. Disadvantages of this model include the lack of flexibility that it is able to tolerate.
This clearly discourages individual initiative and innovation. The rigid rules and procedures make the organization inflexible and slow to respond to changes in market forces. An emphasis on impersonal relations within an organization leads to discontentment in a workforce and a policy of strict division of labor leads to a unmotivated and bored workforce. Overemphasis on rules and procedures may be made so important that the underlying objectives of the organization may become secondary to the strict adherence to procedure.
In today’s world the remnants of bureaucratic structure remains in many organizations. This is a reflection of the strength of Weber’s suggestions. It remains of particular relevance to organizations that operate in particularly stable and secure environments, where change occurs infrequently and flexibility is less important than structure. 20. Frank Bunker Gilbreth. Frank Bunker Gilbreth (July 7, 1868-June 14, 1924), born in Fairfield, Maine, was a proponent of Taylorism and a pioneer of time-motion studies.
With his wife and collaborator, Lillian Moller Gilbreth, he sought to understand the work habits of industrial employees and to find ways to increase their output. He and Lillian were partners in their own management consulting firm, Gilbreth, Inc. , which focused on such endeavors. Gilbreth was a prolific researcher and often used his large family (and himself) as guinea pigs in his experiments. Their exploits are lovingly detailed in the book Cheaper by the Dozen, which was written by his son Frank Jr. and daughter Ernestine Gilbreth Carey and published in 1950.
The book has since inspired two movie versions, one in 1950 and the second in 2003. The first, starring Clifton Webb and Myrna Loy, is considered by many to be superior to the 2003 version, which stars comedians Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt and takes considerable liberties with the original story. Gilbreth died suddenly of heart failure in Montclair, New Jersey on June 14, 1924, leaving behind 11 children and a wife, who subsequently raised the children on her own. Their subsequent adventures are outlined in a second book by Frank Jr. and Ernestine, Belles on Their Toes, which was published in 1952. 1. Eli Whitney. Eli Whitney (December 8, 1765 – January 8, 1825) was an American inventor and manufacturer who is credited with creating the first cotton gin in 1793. The cotton gin was a mechanical device which removed the seeds from cotton, a process which was until that time extremely labor-intensive. On January 6, 1817 Whitney married Henrietta Edwards and they had four children. Whitney’s greatest contribution to American industry was the development and implementation of the American System of manufacturing and the assembly line, which he was the first to use when producing muskets for the U.
S. Government. Whitney’s concepts were later exploited by Henry Ford and others in manufacturing. There exists question today over whether the cotton gin, which Whitney received a patent for on March 14, 1794, and its constituent elements should rightly be attributed to Eli Whitney; some contend that Catherine Littlefield Greene should be credited with the invention of the cotton gin, or at least its conception. It is known that she associated with Eli Whitney (along with other historical figures such as George and Martha Washington).
Some historians believe that this invention allowed for the African slavery system in the Southern United States to become more sustainable at a critical point in its development. Born in Westborough, Massachusetts, he graduated from Yale College in 1792. While his ideas were innovative and useful, they were so easy to understand and reproduce that the concepts and designs were readily duplicated by others. Whitney’s company that produced cotton gins went out of business in 1797. He never patented his later inventions, one of which was a milling machine. 22. Karol Adamiecki.
Karol Adamiecki (b. March 18, 1866 in Dabrowa Gornicza – May 16, 1933 in Warsaw, Poland) was a Polish economist, engineer and management researcher. Professor of Politechnika Warszawska. Founder and first director (1925-1933) of Instytut Naukowej Organizacji in Warsaw. Vicepresident of European Association of Scientific Management (pl. Europejskie Stowarzyszenie Naukowego Zarzadzania). Karol Adamiecki was one of the most famous management researchers in Central and Eastern Europe in his times. He begun his research in Petersburg, Russia, then moved to Poland.
He did majority of his research and observation in the metallurgy area. He is the author of the law of harmony in management – harmony should be composed of three parts: Harmony of choice (all production tools should be compatible with each other, with special regard to their output production speed) Harmony of doing (importance of time coordination, schedules and harmonograms) Harmony of spirit (importance of creating a good team) He is the patron of The Karol Adamiecki University of Economics in Katowice (pl. Akademia Ekonomiczna im. Karola Adamieckiego w Katowicach). 3. David MacKenzie. David MacKenzie Ogilvy (June 23, 1911–July 21, 1999) has been often called ‘The Father of Advertising’. He was known for a career of expanding the bounds of both creativity and morality. Many of his ads showed nudity. One of his most creative campaigns was a serious of three ads in 1981. The first ad showed a beautiful woman in a bathing suit and the caption said “On September 2, I will take off my top”. On September 2 a second ad showed the same woman wearing only the thong from her bathing suit and the caption said “On September 4, I will take off the bottom”.
By September 4th the buzz was intense. Every man was eager to see if she would keep her promise. She did. (If you wish to see the three ads they are in (Ogilvy, D 1983 : page 26 – 27. ) Ogilvy has been the bane of several puritanical cultures including Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United States. 24. J. Edgar Thompson. During the 1850’s and 60’s, the railroad revolution rocked the industrializing world, in much the same way that the internet revolution is changing things today. In the United States, the best-managed railroad company was the Pennsylvania Railroad. Its master, J.
Edgar Thomson, was the foremost management practitioner of his time. Thomson was prominently featured along with the more widely known Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and Pierpont Morgan… The editors praised him for setting a pattern of rail construction and organization that was long imitated. They noted he expanded his railroad system from 250 miles to over 6,000 miles as his company’s profits rose from $617,000 to $8. 6 million during his years in charge; they were particularly impressed by the fact that in large part those profits came from his ability to cut costs, from 1. 909 cents per ton mile in 1864 to 0. 78 cents in 1873. But Thomson would have been proudest of the editors’ personal tribute – their simple declaration that “no scandal touched this man. ” Thomson’s plan clearly delineated the lines of authority from employees at the lowest divisional levels through the general superintendent. Motive power, maintenance of way, and accounting officers were carefully included in the chain of command at all levels. Forms were standardized, and information flowed smoothly through prescribed channels. Responsibility was widely spread, and many of the road’s future leaders gained their first taste of authority at the lower evels of the company’s line organization. A divisional superintendency quickly became a springboard to the front offices; Scott, Carnegie, James McCrea, and Robert Pitcairn, all gained valuable experience and notice in that job.