Years of Management: Where from and Where to Now?

Managers, over the course of the 20th century, transformed the world in which we live and work.

Like every other sub-species, managers evolved – a product of an environment they themselves constantly shape, mould and recreate at the behest of owners and the dictates of the marketplace. Their ancestry dates back several thousand years, but 'modern managers' really only emerged from the grime of the Industrial Revolution in the 20th century.

Despite this fast-tracked evolution, some experts believe management's organizational habitat is changing so rapidly that managers will not adapt in time to survive. When Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith, authors of the book The End of Management, told one of managements founding theorists Peter Drucker of their plans to write the book, he simply responded: "It's about time."

But is it really likely that managers have had their day? Doubtful, although there is a pronounced global swing toward greatly modified behaviour. Managers at the top end of the corporate feeding chain all too frequently show signs of excessive behaviour and abuse of their environment. Over-grazing can lead to extinction.

For their first 50 or so years, modern managers were masters and commanders – not much removed from their feudal ancestors. Command-and-control management survives to this day. It consists of a set of policies and procedures designed to provide managers with the tools to demand employee compliance, a form of minimalist individuality.

The first half of the 20th century was the scientific management age. Working life and enterprise was dominated by the assembly line and systematisers like Frederick Taylor, who introduced discipline and task analysis to "previously ad-hoe" operations. Schools of business, like Harvard, appeared and in 1922 Harvard began publishing the Harvard Business Review, a magazine committed to publishing the new genre of academic management literature. The first comprehensive account of executive management was written in 1916 by a Frenchman, Henri Fayol. But, according to HBR, "Taylor's influence was so great" that it took several decades before the Frenchman's ideas on formal management responsibilities became widely known.

The 1930s' depression and its ultimate solution, increased government regulation, changed the marketplace and, before long, the managers' world. America's New Deal[1] and Europe's Welfare State[2] emerged. Unions challenged management control while some American business writers argued that stockholders had lost influence over their managers. By war's end the first age of managers was over, though a good many old practices remain.

After 1945 marketing and diversification took hold. A decade later, Drucker wrote his Practice of Management – a comprehensive guide that emphasised management objectives rather than social relations. America's W.Edwards Deming, a neglected prophet in his homeland, began converting war-spawned Japanese industries to his teachings on "quality management". And the surge in corporate growth and confidence – particularly in America – took off and continued unabated for the rest of the century, increasingly assisted by at first a fledgling, then a soaring information technology industry.

Drucker called managers "... the dynamic, life-giving element of every business". Without a manager's leadership the resources of production remain just that – resources that "never become production". Managers determine the success and the survival of a business. "The quality and performance of its managers is the only effective advantage an enterprise in a competitive economy can have," Drucker wrote in the introduction to his Practice of Management.

In the early 1960s, Douglas McGregor advanced his "Theory Y"[3] to challenge command-and-control orthodoxies, advocating a "softer style" of management. The fact that people respond better to motivation and inspiration was, it seems, lost sight of during and well after the Industrial Revolution.

The '60s witnessed the up-welling of what became an unrelenting stream of management literature. Super managers like General Motors' Alfred P. Sloan, credited with U-turning the moribund motor company in just three years, recounted their exploits in books like My Years with General Motors, a classic on how to apply the principles of total marketing and decentralization.

According to Harvard Business Review, strategy and social change dominated US management thinking through the '60s and into the early '70s. Strategists like Alfred Chandler and Kenneth Andrews identified strategy as the "primary work of executives". And after McGregor explained Theory Y, Frederick Herzberg, an American clinical psychologist, discovered "job enrichment" and told companies to boost job satisfaction by making full use of their employees, rather than depend on sensitivity training. Henry Mintzberg argued that effective managers rely heavily on intuition and personal contact. And Rosabeth Moss Kanter explored the ways in which hierarchies impeded women's advance through management ranks.

Competitive challenge and restructuring prevailed through the second half of the '70s and well into the '80s. Meanwhile technology hit its straps and on its back rode the millennia's closing decade, and with it the environment-changing forces of globalization and knowledge. Technology with its enhanced communications capabilities and knowledge management potential has, and will continue to greatly impact our management environment. But the consensus is simply that people will be more important in a technology-dominated world.

Abridged from: 50 Years of Management: Where from and Where to Now? New Zealand Management, Feb 2004

Ex.2. Read the article in detail an answer the questions: