History of Management in 50 Tweets

#hist50 Stonehenge, pyramids, Hanging Gardens all required managers, but called slave drivers. Then, in Indl Rev, supervisors & overseers.

#hist50 Latin manus (hand); Italian maneggiare (to handle); French ménagement (care) evolve into modern word, management.

#hist50 19th century management’s genesis: household management, Mrs Beeton, efficiency guru; organization & leadership of military.

#hist50 Elihu Root, Sec of War, re-organized the General Staff of the US Army. Peter Drucker cites as early exemplar of management @ work.

#hist50 Ford’s mass production. Scale required managers. ‘Our policy is to reduce the price, extend the operations & improve the article’.

#hist50 1908 1st MBA offered at Harvard. Grad school of business set up 1919. MBA one of great educational success stories of century.

#hist50 1st management consultant & guru, Frederick Taylor. Creator scientific management. Inventor and tennis champion. Lenin was a fan.

#hist50 Scientific management: managers had stop watches; malign overseers. Still exerts influence; if not, we’d all work at home.

#hist50 Early 1900s. What managers do: Planning, Organizing, Staffing, Directing, Co-ordinating, Reporting & Budgeting. Still largely true.

#hist50 Max Weber envisages triumph of bureaucracy, the rational-legal model. Dickens with efficiency. Sound familiar?

#hist50 Peter Drucker championed management as serious discipline from 1930s-2000s. Creator modern management. Met Freud as child.

#hist50 At GM Alfred P Sloan saw managers in organizational context. Managers = organization men. Drucker studied GM, kickstarted career.

#hist50 ‘Management is work, and as such it has its own skills, its own tools, its own techniques.’ Drucker

#hist50 Human side of management discovered 1920s – Mary Parker Follett, 1st female management thinker. Far sighted libertarian.

#hist50 Hawthorne Experiments 1920-30s, Chicago – pay people attention and they perform better; love pays. Ignored.

#hist50 WW2 – high point of Management 1.0, enables mass production on unprecedented scale. Common purpose plus management unbeatable.

#hist50 Post-war US statistician W Edwards Deming introduces Japanese to quality control. They listen and implement. 40 yrs later, reap dividends.

#hist50 1940-50s Rise of organization man a la William Whyte. Safe job, 40 hrs a week for 40 yrs, paper-shuffler, dull but fulfilled by white goods.

#hist50 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs helps explain motivation. Self actualization at top. Not on most managerial agendas then or now.

#hist50 McGregor’s Theories X and Y. Carrot and/or stick. You choose. Sticks largely preferred but carrots increasingly on offer.

#hist50 1960s rise of strategy. Chandler begets Ansoff and strategic management. Look hard enough and the future can be explained.

#hist50 Management by Objectives. A to B. The future is linear and the job of the manager is to join the dots, all two of them.

#hist50 Forget Hendrix, hallucinogenics, & summer of love; all managers receive is KISS & strategic management.

#hist50 1970s The manager as ultimate rationalist; analysis explains all, but paralysis by analysis. Exemplified by Harold Geneen at ITT.

#hist50 Henry Mintzberg’s Nature of Managerial Work: managers spend v short periods of time on anything; endlessly distracted, action oriented.

#hist50 Ed Schein explains idea of corporate culture, the way things are done around here. Foosball sales rocket.

#hist50 Management consulting becomes heavy industry. (Self-proclaimed) smartest people in room flock to Bain, BCG, McKinsey.

#hist50 Japanese reap rewards of TQM, quality products and production. Sleepwalking, US discovers this via NBC TV program about Deming.

#hist50 In Search of Excellence 1982. Brings good news! Western managers not all bad. Invents business book market. Ooops! Companies soon flop.

#hist50 MBWA, management by walking around. Not rocket science after all. Leads to empowerment. Fashionable talk, rather than persuasive practice.

#hist50 Managers discover customers & quality. Programs & initiatives abound. The customer is king! Create new departmts thus missing point.

#hist50 Michael Porter unveils 5 forces which explains how companies compete. Differentiate or die. The high point of frameworks.

#hist50 Leadership rediscovered. Management for heroes. Change accepted as normal. Kotter suggests 8 step approach.

#hist50 Backlash. Soft stuff gives way to the hard stuff. Reengineering new big idea. Processes trimmed. Middle managers, heroes in 50s, killed off.

#hist50 Managers discover technology. Virtual working discussed ad nauseum. Rise of knowledge worker predicted in late 60s by Drucker.

#hist50 Knowledge rules. We’re all knowledge workers. Intellectual capital more powerful than capital…for a day or two.

#hist50 Hamel & Prahalad champion core competencies. Discover what your great at and then develop strategy to maximize.

#hist50 Balanced scorecard devd by Kaplan & Norton. Managerial dashboard. Managers fall in love with measurement, again.

#hist50 Internet revolutionizes management. PAs in short supply. Strangely managers now work longer and churn accelerating.

#hist50 e-everything. Entrepreneurs sexy, managers dull. But dot-coms which work bring in managers pronto.

#hist50 Managers discover emotional intelligence, but still dream of the hard-edged business savvy of Jack Welch.

#hist50 Professionalization of managers. Desperate for status/acceptance/more money, call for the professional manager. MBA boom.

#hist50 Kim & Mauborgne create new vocab for strategy. Value innovation. Fair process. Forget about red oceans, create your own blue oceans.

#hist50 R&D morphs into innovation, suddenly preserve of managers as well as difficult-to-manage boffins. Trouble is boffins now VIPs.

#hist50 Clay Christensen makes sense of the innovator’s dilemma and disruptive innovation. Next, disrupt the disruptor.

#hist50 Enron et al give managers a bad press. Re-discovery of ethics leads to more forms to fill in and boxes to tick.

#hist50 Bill George champions authenticity. Leaders & managers need to embrace, well, themselves. Difficult.

#hist50 Julian Birkinshaw & Gary Hamel create MLab, idea that management innovation is source of competitive advantage. Ask Toyota.

#hist50 Managers have to reinvent the carrot. Demanding millenials demand a more varied diet.

#hist50 Management truly global, often virtual & highly complex. Future difficult, hypercompetition, commoditization. Management the answer.