Businessweek gave Peter Drucker the nickname “the man who invented management”, and he has long been considered one of the most influential management thinkers. Every year, his namesake, the Drucker Institute, organizes a conference in Vienna that continues to attract business thinkers and top CEOs. To truly understand the current thinking of management, it is necessary to examine its historical links. Scientific management is a management theory that analyzes workflows to improve economic efficiency, especially labor productivity.
This theory was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s in the United States. After the term and idea were mentioned, Drucker's student, George Odiorne, continued to develop the idea in his book Management Decisions by Objectives, published in the mid-1960s. The functions of these managers can be centralized by appointing a project manager who can monitor and control the activities of the various departments. Taylor first developed the idea of dividing each job into component parts and timing each part to determine the most efficient working method. Henry Fayol (1841-192) and Alexander Church (1866-193) described the various branches of administration and their interrelationships.
Gantt also designed graphical management aids called Gantt charts that use horizontal bars to plan and track work. In doing so, they also laid the foundation for modern notions of business management theory and practice. Some organizations have experimented with other methods (such as employee voting models) to select or review managers, but this is rare. At the time of Taylor's publication, managers believed that workers were lazy and worked slowly and inefficiently. To combat this, they sought out students who wanted to become researchers or professors in business administration or management.
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) was founded in 1880 and was one of the first advocates of the pursuit of scientific management. The first modern school of management thought was based on Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management and emerged at the end of the 19th century. Organizational development, which came to consist of theory of change, action research and action learning, focused on the application of behavioral science concepts. Meanwhile, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were completing their own work in motion studies to promote scientific management. Today's management has to deal with an explosion of data now available to facilitate business decisions. Collecting, organizing and using data in a logical, timely and cost-effective way is creating a whole new paradigm of managerial competence.
While Taylor was studying time, Frank and Lillian Gilbreth were completing their own work in motion studies to promote scientific management. The evolution of management has come a long way since Frederick Taylor's principles of scientific management. From George Odiorne's Management Decisions by Objectives, to Henry Fayol's branches of administration, to Frank and Lillian Gilbreth's motion studies - all have contributed to our current understanding of how businesses should be managed in today's digital age.
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