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Management history

Published on September 27, 2010   60 min

A selection of talks on Management, Leadership & Organisation

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0:00
Hello. My name is Morgen Witzel. I'm an honorary senior fellow at the University of Exeter Business School in the UK. I'm also a historian of management. This is one of a series of talks on the subject of management history. Others of my colleagues who are specialists in different fields will be talking to you later about their own subjects, marketing, human resource management strategy, and so on and explaining to you how those disciplines developed and what their history is. My purpose today is slightly different. I want to talk to you about the overall subject of management history. What it is, why it matters. Possibly some of you know what management history is. Many of you may be a little confused by the term. Quite a few of you, I suspect, don't realize just how long and rich the history of management is. It's that that we will be discussing today.
0:46
First some definitions. What is management history? It really encompasses two key themes. There is first of all the history of management ideas. These are the theories that people have developed over the years about how organizations should be managed. There are a number of these that have developed over the last 100 years or so. One of the most famous is scientific management, which we'll come onto later on, which was developed in the early part of the 20th century. Business process reengineering, which was one of the great management ideas of the 1990s. Many of you will be familiar with this. Knowledge management, another idea which came up in the 1990s. These are examples of ideas that have made an impact on the way we manage businesses today. Then there's the history of management in practice. How did people solve problems? How did people make decisions? How did people lead and motivate others? Interestingly, how did they do this before this accretion of management theory which we have today? It has to be remembered that the management theory, the management ideas, are really only a little over 100 years old. The primary book Frederick Winslow Taylor's, The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911. But people have been managing large businesses, large enterprises, large organizations for a very long time. How did they do that? What kind of tools and techniques and steps did they use? That's one of the really interesting things that we can learn from management history.

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Management history

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