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 Austrian-American business writer, Peter Drucker, stressed the importance of the relationships between manager and staff. Like Fayol, he held that the better the relationships, the greater the organisation's achievements. Drucker departed from Scientific Management's emphasis on efficiency and structure by advocating that a manager's...

Michael Porter regarded the selection of a defendable position within an industry as the end result of a competitive strategic analysis. He argued that successful, profitable companies generally choose to compete on either low costs or by differentiating their products to meet specific customer needs. Although these two strategic options are mutually exclusive,...

In the mid 1970's, the Dutch academic, Geert Hofstede, based his five dimensions of culture on an extensive survey at IBM in which he investigated the influence of national culture. His methodology was both unique in size as well in structure. He defined organisational culture is an idea system that is largely shared between organisational members. By filtering...