Management development

The father of modern management is French... and an engineer! When, in 1916, Henri Fayol published his "Administration industrielle et générale" in the Bulletin de la Société de l'Industrie minérale, he laid the foundations for management in the early 20th century (which could not yet be called management, as the term did not yet exist). Borrowing etymologically from the household and the merry-go-round, the notion of management, defined by Raymond-Alain Thiétart as the act of directing, planning the development of and controlling an organization, gradually spread.

A century later, numerous management methods (Fordism, Toyotism, etc.) have appeared, and numerous tools (quality circles, balanced scorecards, etc.) have been developed. Today, management is no longer the same, having undergone profound changes.

It is these very developments that we present, starting by identifying the mechanisms behind them. We will focus less on managerial innovation than on its diffusion within a population of companies. Indeed, dissemination presents much broader issues: for one Toyota company, how many hundreds of thousands of businesses have adopted a more or less modified form of Toyotism?

Next, we cite a few remarkable developments in recent managerial practices. These are so diverse and fluctuating that such an evocation does not, of course, claim to be exhaustive. According to a study by Bain (an international consulting firm), the 25 most popular management tools in 2011 include a wide variety of practices, from rapid prototyping and customer relationship management to mergers & acquisitions and shared service centers. Here are just a few of the most important recent management practices.