ABSTRACT
Management is one of the essential features of civilisation. Throughout recorded history, wherever human beings have gathered together to undertake great works – build monuments, found cities, establish trade routes, create business and industrial concerns, establish hospitals or universities or religious foundations, publish books and music – there have been managers working on these projects. Indeed, we can go so far as to say that most of these projects could not have been completed without managers, who planned and guided the projects and saw them through to completion. As the late Peter Drucker observed, businesses do not run themselves.
A business enterprise cannot survive without good management, or at least not for long. That was as true four thousand years ago as it is today. Why study the history of management? It is an interesting subject, full of
surprising facts, and the careers of some managers in the past can provide us with useful ideas, even inspiration. Much more importantly, though, the study of management in the past can tell us a great deal about what management is, and how it evolves and changes. And understanding the nature of management is in turn important when we come to the search for best practice today. The titles of the two works quoted above are as important as the quotes
themselves. Oliver Sheldon, who at the time he wrote these words was a senior executive with the Rowntree company in Britain, argued that management is a mental activity. Management, he said, is not something that can be delegated to machines; it is something that must be done by people. How those people conceive of management, how they think about management and its tasks and responsibilities – in other words, their philosophy of management – has a direct impact on how well they carry out those tasks and shoulder those responsibilities. That argument continues to be made today, for example by Richardson (2008) who argues that managers need to spend more time thinking about philosophy and less about science. Drucker, still the world’s most popular and widely read management guru,
would have agreed with Sheldon, but he believed that the managerial tasks and responsibilities themselves were of paramount importance. Ultimately, in
Drucker’s view, management is about doing things. It is about making things happen, getting results, satisfying customers, generating profits, creating value. It follows that anything managers can do to improve their performance will result in more satisfactory outcomes: more satisfied customers, more profits, more value and so on. A little reflection will show that both are right. Philosophy and practice are
both essential; indeed, they complement each other. Management is an activity which is carried out by people (albeit with the assistance of various bits of technology, ranging in sophistication from the abacus to the BlackBerry). Any business is only as good as the people who are running it, and of all the parts of a business, it is management that in the end makes the greatest contribution to success – or failure. That means we must pay attention to both process – what managers do and how they do it – and purpose – why they do it. Before these questions can be answered, however, there is another that
should first be considered. What is management? How do we define the term, whether we are speaking philosophically or practically? All too often, this question is sidestepped. We assume that we already know what management is, and proceed blithely to talk about the management of technology, or innovation, or people, or finance, without really stopping to think what tasks and responsibilities are involved, or about what it really means to be a manager. A second assumption is that management is relatively new. We are told
repeatedly that management – sometimes the caveat ‘professional management’ is added – only began in the twentieth century. But consider the following:
