Lyndall Urwick
Lyndall Fownes Urwick (March 3,
1891-December 5, 1983) was an influential business consultant and
thinker in the United Kingdom. He is recognized for integrating the
ideas of earlier theorists like
Henri Fayol into a
comprehensive theory of administration. He wrote a book called The
Elements of Business Administration, published in 1943. With
Luther Gulick, he
founded the academic journal Administrative Science Quarterly.
Lyndall Urwick was born in Worcestershire, the son of a partner in
Fownes Brothers, a long-established glove-making firm. He was educated
at Repton School and New College, Oxford, where he read History. He saw
active service in the trenches during the First World War, rising to the
rank of Major, and being awarded the Military Cross. Though he did not
himself attend the military Staff College at Camberley, his respect for
military training would affect his outlook on management in later life.
After the war, he joined his father's business of Fownes Brothers. He
was then recruited by Seebohm Rowntree, head of the York chocolate
company and progressive philanthropist. Urwick's role involved assisting
the modernisation of the company, bringing to bear his own thinking
which had two main influences. One was the work of Frederick Winslow
Taylor with its concept of scientific management, and the other,
counterbalancing it in its emphasis on the humanity of management was
Mary Parker Follett, for whom he had great admiration. Urwick's own
prolific writings on management truly began in this period.
His growing reputation as a British thinker on management and
administration won him appointment in 1928 as Director of the
International Management Institute in Geneva. The Institute may have
proven short-lived, closing in 1933, but it provided Urwick the
opportunity not only to lecture widely but to produce his books The
Meaning of Rationalisation and The Management of Tomorrow. It was also
the time that he became particularly keen to promote the writings of
Henri Fayol to an
English audience.
When Urwick returned to Britain, he established a management
consultancy, Urwick Orr and Partners which came to be one of the leading
companies of its type in the 1940s and 1950s. At the same time, his
intellectual interests continued. An increasing concern of his was the
lack of management education in Britain. He was involved in the very
earliest discussions for what would become, in 1948, the Administrative
Staff College. His own view of the education required did not accord
with the College as it was finally established, which concentrated on a
three-month course for established executives. He would have preferred
something much closer to the model of the American business school,
involving a longer course and aimed at pre-experience students. It was a
continuing frustration for Urwick that England's two ancient
universities failed to promote management education.
In later years, Lyndall Urwick retired to Australia, where he died in
1983. His papers were donated to the Administrative Staff College, by
then re-named Henley Management College.
Lyndall Urwick (1891-1983) was a
British army officer turned theorist and consultant whose work
integrated the ideas of scientific management with the ideas of
classical organization theory.
Luther Gulick
(1892-1970) served on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on
Administrative Management during the 1930s, and his major interests were
political science and public service.
Urwick and Gulick edited a 1937 publication titled Papers on the Science
of Administration, which included articles on organization theory and
public administration.
Luther Gulick isolated the responsibilities of the chief executive
and enumerated them according to the acronym
POSDCORB,
which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing,
coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. One of his main points was that
well-managed, self-contained organizations or departments are nearly
always headed by a single top manager such as a CEO. For his part,
Urwick believed that the activities necessary to achieve organizational
goals should be grouped and assigned to individuals in an impersonal
way, echoing the impartial detachment of
Max Weber's bureaucracy.
Lyndall Urwick also wrote about the problems of managing large numbers
of employees, identified multiple levels of supervisory management, and
used a formula to determine the minimum and maximum number of
subordinates a manager can effectively supervise. His work was an
important step in synthesizing the principles of scientific management
with the thinking of Max Weber
and Henri Fayol .
References
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyndall_Urwick
http://www.blurtit.com/q673296.html
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