Back in the early 1900s, a French engineer and mining company executive named Henry Thaill published a work that was later translated into English as general and industrial administration.

And this English translation achieved wider distribution and notoriety than the French original, bringing his 1916 ideas to a fairly large

1949 audience.

His ideas were focused on the mining industry, which was something he knew a great deal

about.

And more specifically, he defined in this publication a fairly comprehensive theory of management, which

could be applied to other fields as well.

This theory defined the main categories of work-related activities, the functions that should

be performed by people and managerial positions, and principles that should guide the

administration of these functions, including how

the folks being managed should be managed.

Some of these concepts are today familiar to most modern workers, primarily because of their

near parallel explication by an American engineer who focused on the steel industry named Frederick

Winslow Taylor. His conception of management, often called Taylorism, but which he called

scientific management, is often conflated with Fordism, which is a very similar managerial approach that was used by

Henry Ford in setting up the Ford Motor Company, though these two American originating

managerial approaches were different in some subtle ways, and also apparently evolved independently,

despite the widespread assumption contemporaneously that Ford had based his model on tailors.

Among the shared concepts defined and refined by these three industrialists is the idea that division of labor is vital,

and different employees specializing in different sorts of work should be

managed and treated differently. These theories also share the assumption that having a set,

well-defined chain of authority is vital, and most ideally, people within such a chain,

...