'Far too many management programs are ahistorical; history appears only in passing. Students may know that a firm described as post-Fordist has something to do with Henry or even that it was Charles Babbage who has something to do with their p.c. The Biographical Dictionary of Management helps make clear why someone would refer to a firm as being "Morganized" or "Taylorized", why one would refer to a theory as "Friedmanesque" or "Galbraithian", why one would refer to "the pioneering work of Ivy Lee", or why any of approximately 600 other individuals are important to the study of management science.'
—Louis Cain
The Biographical Dictionary of Management is a major new reference work covering the growth and development of management as a discipline over the last four thousand years, from the merchant princes of Assyria and Tyre to the online entrepreneurs of the late twentieth century. Over 600 entries provide coverage not only of important figures — Henry Ford, Adam Smith, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henri Fayol, Jack Welch, Lyndall Fownes Urwick, Alfred P. Sloan and others — but also many who contributed on a smaller scale, like Mitsui Takatoshi, the founder of Mitsui; Ida Minerva Telfer, a pioneering writer on the role of women in business; Decius Alpinus, the Roman businessman who developed an M-form business nearly two millennia before Alfred Chandler first conceptualized it; or Arie de Geus, whose early work on knowledge as a corporate asset is now at the heart of most thinking on knowledge management. European, American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian, Latin American and African thinkers, writers and practitioners will be included.
This ambitious and unique work attempts to capture the growth and development of management as a discipline since the dawn of commerce. Unlike other biographical dictionaries of business, this is not simply an enumeration of the great and the good. To qualify for inclusion, subjects must have either made an important contribution to the discipline of management, or be outstanding exemplars of important trends. Thus we include many businesspeople and business academics, but also many from outside the strict bounds of the discipline whose ideas and actions have nonetheless had an impact on how business is done today. Economists, inventors, strategists, futurists, ethicists, psychologists and many others will appear, men and women whose thinking has helped shaped our thinking about management.
Far more than just another exercise in business history, the Biographical Dictionary of Management is in part an attempt to describe a philosophy of management. To that end, the authors of this work include not only business academics but also professional business people and business journalists, historians and futurists, economists and specialists in many fields. By giving the topic the broadest possible scope, we hope to capture all the richness and diversity of management thinking, past and present.
Key features of the work include:
—its inclusive nature, covering all the major business cultures and the development of management thinking and practice since the beginning of history
—analysis of the contributions of many prominent figures such as Thomas Watson, Matushita Konosuke, Iwasaki Yataro, Peter Drucker, Lillian and Frank Gilbreth, W. Edwards Deming, Toyoda Kichiro, Pierre Du Pont, Bill Gates and more.
—key figures in management studies who have transformed our view of how businesses are run, including Michael Porter, Philip Kotler, Alfred Chandler, Chris Argyris, Donald Schon and Herbert Simon
—details of hundreds of important thinkers and practitioners as various as James Mooney, A. W. Shaw, Richard Arkwright, Melvin Copeland, Oliver Sheldon, Cosimo dei Medici, Charles Babbage, Jehangir Tata, Henry Poor and many others
—entries on many important influences on management thinking from other disciplines, such as strategy (Karl von Clausewitz, Sun Tzu), economics (Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, John Stewart Mill, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman), futurology (Alvin Toffler, Bertrand de Jouvenel, Willis Harman), design (William Morris), psychology (Abraham Maslow, Mary Parker Follett), government and public administration (Luther Gulick, Mao Zedong)
—entries on people who pioneered management techniques in new industries, such as hospitality and tourism, film and media, computers and information technology, including figures as diverse William Randolph Hearst, Samuel Goldwyn, Ray Krock and Florence Nightingale
—contributions from more than fifty authors, from China, Japan, India, Australia, the USA, Canada, the UK, France and Greece
—indexed by name and subject and cross-referenced for easy use