ABSTRACT
When Karl Marx was beginning work on Das Kapital in the 1850s, the phenomenon of management was unknown. So were the enterprises that managers run. On the threshold of World War I, a few thinkers were just becoming aware of management’s existence. But few people even in the most advanced countries had anything to do with it. In less than 150 years, management has transformed the social and economic fabric of the world’s developed countries. It has created a global economy and set new rules for countries that would participate in that economy as equals. Few yet accept it as a social function. But it is precisely because management has become so pervasive as a social function that it faces its most serious challenge. Management is thus what tradition used to call a liberal art—“liberal” because it deals with the fundamentals of knowledge, self-knowledge, wisdom, and leadership; “art” because it is also concerned with practice and application.
