Q #147: Who were the most influential business thinkers in the 20th century?

In this series, Bob Morris poses a key question and then responds to it with material from one or more of the business books he has reviewed for Amazon and Borders.

One man’s opinion, here’s my “Top Ten”:

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) introduced measurement of time in relation effort to determine nature and extent of productivity.

Henry Ford (1863-1947) applied Eli Whitney’s ideas about mass production of interchangeable parts to what became the assembly line.

Chester Barnard (1886-1961) was one of the few who managed to bridge the gap between theory and practice. He was a highly successful practitioner and an innovative theorist.

Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr. (1875-1966) did for the upper levels of government what Ford did for the shop floor: he turned it into a reliable, efficient, machine-like process; he also created a new organizational form, that combined decentralized operations with coordinated, centralized policy control.

Elton Mayo (1880-1949) was among the first to focus attention on workers as human beings, stressing the importance of creating organizations in which working conditions and career opportunities respond to workers’ needs and aspirations.

W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) probably had greater impact upon Japanese manufacturing and business than any other individual not of Japanese heritage. He taught top management in major Japanese companies how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing and sales (the last through global markets) through various methods, including the application of statistical methods.

Akio Morita (1911-1999) and Konosuke Matsushita (1894-94) who demonstrated the practical value of Deming’s theories that enabled their companies (Sony and Matsushita) to produce innovative high-quality products and increase the global influence of their economic power.

Douglas McGregor (1906-1964) introduced two mutually-exclusive theories, Theory X and Theory Y, that continue to be debated today in terms of the relationship between workers and those who supervise them. Many organizations now synthesize features of both.

Peter Drucker (1909-2005) is generally credited with establishing management as an academic discipline and as a profession. He is arguably the most influential business thinker and certainly the most prolific, having written more than 40 books and published more than a thousand articles.

Rounding out my list of ten would be a cluster of business thinkers who became influential late in the 20th century and remain active and productive. They are listed in alphabetical order: Warren Bennis, Ken Blanchard, Ram Charan, Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, Michael Hammer, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Michael Porter, C.K. Prahalad, Noel Tichy, and James Womack.

Comments, questions, requests, or suggestions? Please share them. They will be most welcome and I thank you for them. Best regards, Bob