Management Challenges for the 21st Century

Chapter One

Management Is Business Management

For most people, inside and outside management, this assumption is taken as self-evident. Indeed management writers, management practitioners and the laity do not even hear the word "management"; they automatically hear business management.

This assumption regarding the universe of management is of fairly recent origin. Before the 1930s the few writers and thinkers who concerned themselves with management—beginning with Frederick Winslow Taylor around the turn of the century and ending with Chester Barnard just before World War II—all assumed that business management is just a subspecies of general management and basically no more different from the management of any other organization than one breed of dogs is from another breed of dogs.

The first practical application of management theory did not take place in a business but in nonprofits and government agencies. Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), the inventor of "Scientific Management," in all probability also coined the terms "Management" and "Consultant" in the ... read full excerpt from Management Challenges for the 21st Centu ebook