Pedro Monteiro

5: The Law of the Situation – Mary Parker Follett

This episode is a review of one of Mary Parker Follett’s great lectures, "The Giving of Orders," contained in a collection of Follett’s lectures and writings that was assembled by Lyndall Urwick at the end of her life in an effort to preserve her ideas for others. Follett believed that exploring “the science of the situation” involved both management and workers studying the situation together.

4: Carnegie Mellon Series #1 – Organizational Routines

In our first episode on the Carnegie-Mellon School, we examine selected passages from March & Simon's book Organizations and Cyert & March's book A Behavioral Theory of the Firm to address the rise of scholarly thought on matters of organizational routines

3: Theory of Human Motivation – Abraham Maslow

We discuss "A Theory of Human Motivation" by Abraham H. Maslow, one of the most famous psychology articles ever written. Originally published in 1943, it was in this landmark paper that Maslow presented his first detailed representation of Self-Actualization - the desire to become everything that one is capable of becoming - at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of human needs. What Maslow is most famous for, however, is the pyramid of human needs.

2: General and Industrial Management – H. Fayol’s Theory of Administration

For this episode, we are reading part of Henri Fayol's central 1916 work, General and Industrial Management (first translated into English in 1929, but not published in the United States until 1949). In this work Fayol clearly outlined the five distinct elements of management and the fourteen principles that he believed should guide managers in administering those elements.

Your Kitchen Probably Comes from F. W. Taylor!

It might sound strange at first, but the impact of Taylor's ideas went way beyond factory work and production! The attention for optimizing work activities was taken up by numerous others, the Gilbreth couple perhaps being the most famous ones. Check out the photos in this special post to learn if your kitchen was a product of scientific management!

1: Principles of Scientific Management – F.W. Taylor’s One Best Way

Presents the seminal text that defined Taylorism and scientific management, a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. The ‘Principles of Scientific Management’ proposed a ‘scientific’ approach to managing people and work process design. Taylor decried the waste of effort and resources that resulted from inefficient management practices, and thus proposed a science-based way of analyzing and reorganizing both the work and the management of it.