Thoughts on the history of management

The word management has always been somewhat of a mystery for me until some years ago. It was to connected with a sense of an unreachable, controlling elite and common stereotypes (e.g. humans that act without emotions) as the main driving force in that elite. As I got more open due to various experiences throughout the years, I understood that management is a very broad term, applied to almost everything that is connected to how we live our lives.

Management in common sense means for me, the ability to resolve complex problems that concern a large number of people. It is the base of the system that keeps our world, and our lives the way we grew up – without it, we would be much less able to sustain our way of living.

But how did this system we have in place today get so widely spread and successful?
To understand that I will in the following illustrate a brief history with some prime examples of management thoughts applied to different times and cultures in the distant past.

One of the first examples of early adoptions of management practises, where the Egyptians about 5000 until 525 Bc. While the pyramids in their structure and appearance, seem very rudimentary and basic today, a huge amount of organization lies behind them.
All stones had to be carefully labelled and transported from the far away stone sites to the construction sites of the pyramids.
As all of this was done without machines, there was a vast number of slaves and workers involved in these architectural projects. Time and resource management was inevitable, therefore, to avoid chaos. For instance carefully planned transports of the stone blocks, which were mostly conducted during the flooding periods of the Nile because transport on land was too tedious to sustain.

A second great civilization that adopted and applied management ideas practices the Babylonians. The „code of Hammurabi“ was one of the earliest written testimonies on law, dated between 2000 and 1700 B.C. It contained a paragraph about a minimum wage, stating a precise amount of grain to be given for a field worker on a given workday. Laws on responsibility of workers were also written down, describing the consequences of mistakes in work processes, which were most often met with punishments related to the damage created. Therefore, people with more complex and dangerous tasks had bigger responsibilities than people with simple tasks, something we still see today.

As a concluding example, the Greek civilizations showed a very strict system of work division. The ideas of Plato stated that the more distinct and specialized a mans craft is, the more expert he may become in it. Therefore, in his Republic, there was a division of work responsibilities and professions in the cities, while on the land, professions stayed a bit more general.

This meant that in a city a house would be built by a number of specialized workers, each only contributing a small fraction of the work, but in what they did, highly proficient, while on land, due to a lack of workers, a house would maybe be built by one or two builders, and be of less quality therefore.
Further, the Greek practices us first principles of management, which could be adopted in a wide range of contexts. Socrates would argue that the duties of a good businessman and the ones of a general were in principals the same. Both have to be recognized as an authority and followed by their subordinates, and both should find appropriate allies in order to be victorious or successful. Basics of good teambuilding were described as well as a system that rewards good behaviour or performance, and punishes failure. We see that these principles are similar to ours today.

Studying the history of management, it becomes clear that it is not a modern invention, but has been a base of human society for as long as it existed in large groups. Task division, authority and first thoughts on laws in managerial contexts have existed in a number of civilizations, and today we still find remains of those in our world.