Between 1924 and 1933, research teams from Harvard University conducted field studies on worker productivity at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant near Chicago, one of the most advanced manufacturing facilities that employed 29,000 workers to produce telephones and telecommunications equipment for AT&T. The experiments initially...

The Canadian academic, Henry Mintzberg who had trained as a mechanical engineer, wrote his PhD thesis at the MIT Sloan School of Management analysing the actual work habits and time management of chief executive officers (CEOs). In 1973, Mintzberg's thesis on the nature of managerial work was adopted as a study and published for a wider audience. Mintzberg's...

The research of American industrial psychologist, Robert N. McMurry, showed that a 'true' salesman should not sell anything to anybody. McMurry first published the notion of different types of sales tasks in 1961. "Each type of sales work requires its own unique configuration of traits, attributes and qualities in its practitioner." To build a productive...

Michael Porter published the Value Chain Analysis in 1985 as a response to criticism that his Five Forces framework lacked an implementation methodology that bridged the gap between internal capabilities and opportunities in the competitive landscape. This framework focused on industry attractiveness as a determinant of the profit potential of all companies...