Biographical Dictionary of Management »

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.