Essays
Clear introductions to the classic management theories — Taylor, Fayol, Weber, Adam Smith, Maslow and the rest — alongside essays on strategy, organizational behaviour and entrepreneurship. Many are restored from my original archive during my Ph.D. notes, preserved in their first form.
Some of this writing is more than a decade old — management-theory essays I wrote while building my first companies, one of them cited on Wikipedia, now restored in their original form. Here is why they are here, and what comes next.
ReadWhat constitutes organizational effectiveness and how to measure it — Robbins, Etzioni, Daft's three contingency approaches, and the Competing Values Framework of Quinn and Rohrbaugh.
ReadKaplan and Norton's Balanced Scorecard supplements financial measures with customer, internal-process, and learning-and-growth perspectives to translate strategy into action.
ReadA concise map of the major theories of motivation in management — Maslow, Alderfer, Herzberg, McClelland, Vroom, Locke and Adams — organised into content and process perspectives.
ReadMax Weber's characteristics of bureaucracy and the position of the official — hierarchy, fixed rules, written documents, expert training, tenure and career.
ReadFrederick Winslow Taylor's scientific management — the 'mental revolution', the causes of inefficiency, and the four principles of scientific management.
ReadAdam Smith on the division of labour — the pin factory, the three causes of increased output, and the famous 'invisible hand' in his own words from The Wealth of Nations.
ReadHenri Fayol's 14 general principles of management — from division of work and unity of command to equity, initiative and esprit de corps.
ReadThe four interrelated stages of strategic management — environmental scanning, strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation & control — with VRIO, SWOT, Porter, the BCG matrix and the Balanced Scorecard.
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