Which management ideas have influenced the world of work over the last 100 years? Leslie Hargreaves examines the modern era of management thinking.
The modern era did not discover the importance and subtleties of organisation, motivation and relationships in the conduct of enterprises. However, the much earlier works of Machiavelli and Shakespeare did. They provided a good glimpse into what makes people tick. But it was approximately a century ago, since a loose discipline of thought – devoted to the exploration of how these issues can be understood within the modern commercial enterprise – took root.
It is about 100 years since ‘scientific management’ created a strategy for achieving business efficiency that echoes down to this day. Along the way, other strands of thinking have explored the human dimension to business management, sought to discover the secrets of excellence and created models for business leaders to build their careers on.
Click here to see a selective timeline of key moments in management thinking stretching back over the last 100 years. This represents ER Consultants’ choice of the most influential ideas and individuals of the modern era. Take FW Taylor’s Scientific Management, which really founded this cottage industry in the quest for efficiency. Not too much later, Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne Experiments showed that a little bit of attention cheers people on in their daily routine. The competition between the promoters of rational efficiency and of emotional engagement had begun.
As the complexity of organisations grew, different models of the enterprise succeeded or failed in different places. But the search for the one best way went on via the quest for excellence and associated efforts at benchmarking. Meanwhile, academic disciplines as diverse as moral philosophy, sociology and individual psychology made their impact on management thinking. Technological change continued its own lurching progress, forcing new thinking about the way people could best work together to harness it.
Throughout this period of intensive thinking and debate some questions arose – and continue to arise – in different forms and as the business landscape develops. Here, we explore some of the questions that have run through this century of debate and exploration:
1.What qualities do people need in order to do their jobs?
The accelerating pace of technological change in the methods of warfare gave a jolting stimulus to the analysis of individual capacity to do the job. Who
could best be trusted to take a fighter plane into the sky and return with it intact? Neither the cache of a young man’s public school, nor his father’s war record a generation before, offered much guidance. But the cost of failure and the prize of success mattered deeply.
From this great need stemmed a HR and psychology movement committed to analysing the requirements of competency and assessing the extent of their existence in the individuals who sought significant roles. It grew from the military to the civil service and then to industry and commerce – who took it up with the zeal that drives any sense of potential competitive advantage. Job analysis, competency definitions and assessment techniques have become both standard and proliferate in the last few decades. And although rigour has increased greatly, the predictive validity of available methods remains frustratingly short of the reasonably desirable. Will more deductive codification increase our understanding – or obscure genuine insight? The quest goes on.
2. What is an organisation?
Ask senior executives what defines their organization and you will receive a variety of responses. An organisation chart – a representation of political and economic relationships – is the most obvious. More romantic executives, such as those of the dotcom generation, will describe it as a community of like-minded souls who share a common purpose. Process-minded executives will describe the key linkages between resources and markets (i.e. the up/ down-stream characterisation of oil giants). Equally hard-headed leaders cite the bundles of expertise that mark their business out from the crowd – like the film technology expertise that made Kodak such product leaders before digital changed the rules. The single defining quality of a business organisation will continue to evade us for the very fact that all these perspectives are both right, yet insufficient. We will continue to insist that only by using multiple lenses to evaluate and develop the organisation will a really useful perspective prevail.
3. Is there such a thing as society?
The Anglo-Saxon dominance of management thinking has not handled the notion of the ‘collective’ very comfortably. The rational ordering of work tasks and structures brought in by the Ford factory model actually only displaced human relations, and conflicts inherent in the firm were given external expression in ‘industrial relations’. At the same time, ancient wisdom about the way teams developed was ignored or lost in the modern order. But – in a story that is far from over – an understanding of how groups come together, change, split, grow and ultimately produce outcomes that range from brilliant creativity to stultifying dysfunctionality, has developed. Even though concepts such as ‘values’ are often reduced to web site slogans, an awareness of group dynamics, organizational cultures and the power of shared aspirations give us a toe-hold on this aspect of the enterprise which we falteringly continue to explore.
4. What’s love got to do with it?
Joining or trying to remain part of a modern enterprise can be like dealing with an over-ardent suitor. Do you share my values? Are you committed – I mean really committed – to my goals? Do your behaviours meet my idea of perfection? Will you go the extra mile? Organisations seem increasingly to want to be loved.
Of course, commitment to the cause has long been understood as a basis of a motivated work force who feel a genuine sense of ownership and involvement in their working lives. And we have developed this understanding through the appreciation of human motivation, the ‘psychological contract’ and the positive consequences of ‘engagement’. In fact, the individual’s relationship to the organisation has always had a dualistic nature in which the yin of engagement and commitment is balanced by the yang of economic efficiency. For example, Ford versus Hawthorne – have continually vied for hegemony. Pure yin or pure yang will almost certainly lead to failure: we will need to continue to find the right balance.
5. What’s the secret of leadership?
Genius, charisma and stature are words that rarely make the lexicon of competencies by which we judge business managers these days. These concepts lack – apparently – convincing behavioural indicators; though most of us know them when we see them at least as reliably as any objective measure. Meanwhile books fly off the self-help shelves as many try to discover these secrets of success. Over the century, management thinkers have also, more cautiously, been digging around in this field. Coming out of clinical psychology, RB Cattell provided a multifaceted view of human personality that for once stood up to scientific evaluation. At a less rigorous level, rule books of effectiveness have come and gone with fashion. Most recently, the comfortingly manageable 7 habits or 5 disciplines have found favour with an audience that was doubtful of the single factor and confused by the bewildering array of advice. Over the decades, the study of leadership itself seems to have come full circle. Starting with the study of charismatic generals and politicians, it then explored the situational leader – a type of leadership that anyone with the right antennae and competencies could deliver. Latterly, however, the transformational leader seems to have just that kind of quality that can successfully convey a vision that followers find compelling. We seem to have come back to the charismatic generals.
6. How should we organise ourselves to succeed?
Many senior executives – confident in so many aspects of their business lives – fret endlessly that their enterprise may not be organised appropriately to meet its goals. Are we too centralised or too fragmented? Should we be functionally organised, P&L oriented or matrix managed? Are we best practice or top decile? Organisational metrics are now better understood, but their ideals remain as elusive as ever. Early in our hundred year review the ordered division and re-aggregation of labour under bureaucratic principles – as exemplified in the Ford revolution – seemed to offer the answer to all these questions. But the increasing complexity of product and process, the emergence of the customer as a significant force, and the differences in effectiveness thrown into relief in an increasingly competitive environment meant that ‘one size fits all’ soon had its day. Yet the question ‘how should we organise?’ remains, even if it is not susceptible to a simple answer.
Total quality management, business re-engineering, benchmarking and the quasi-academic investigations into the essence of ‘excellence’, have continued to exercise that yearning to find a better model and to avoid complacency with what we have. Now we have ‘lean’, which returns us to the Ford factory of 1911 and the quest for efficiency that will never go away.
Your thoughts?
What do you think? Take a look at the 100 Years of Management Thinking timeline here. Have we missed out your own guiding guru or underrepresented strands of thinking that you believe have been more influential? Send your thoughts to: topics@erconsultants.co.uk
© er consultants Topics Issue 2, 2007
