Management, Fayol

According to Henri Fayol (1945), to manage is to forecast and plan, to organise, to command, to co-ordinate and to control.

Critically discuss Fayol’s perspective through an analysis of his and others views on management

Student at the Saint-Etienne School of Mines then engineer, Henri Fayol (Constantinople, 1841 – Paris, 1925) became in 1888, general director of a big mining and metallurgical group. Struck by the weakness, or indeed lack of organisation in the workplace within the group, he focused on defining new rules of government for the business. In 1916, he delivered his reflections in the ‘General theory of Administration’. He is considered the first theorist to consider the administration of businesses. He defined the five key principles of management. These five principles are; plan, organise, command, coordinate and control. Planning is the means to calculate the future and to prepare for it. Organising, because organising a business is to provide it with every thing useful for its operation; materials, tools, capital and personnel. Command, which is putting together the best possible agents that make up the unit, in the interest of his business. Coordinate, with the objective of achieving harmony between all the acts of a business in order to facilitate the operation and lead to success. And finally, control, which is verifying that everything takes place according to adapted programs, the given orders and the accepted principles.

First of all, in this essay we will discuss Fayol’s perspective on management. Then we will compare his work with the one other classical author, Frederick Taylor. And finally we will analyse Henri Mintzberg, a more modern version of management compared to Fayol’s.

To begin, we are going to discuss Fayol’s perspective on management.

First of all, Fayol (1845-1925) focuses his analysis on the profession of manager. This could be due to his extensive career and the experiences that he gained over the years. Indeed, he started at 19 years old as an engineer in a mining company and became the general director, a position he held for 30 years. His work, ‘General theory of Administration’ (Fayol, 1916) is the result of his professional experience, developed principles and rules of management which are primarily practical tips.

Fayol considers that every activity within the company/business is divided into 6 categories:

1. The technical function: production, fabrication, transformation.

2: The commercial function: purchase, sales, trade.

3: The financial function: research and capital management.

4: The security function: protection of property and the employees.

5. The accounting function: inventory, balance sheet, price of returns.

6: The administrative function: Plan, organise, command, coordinate and control.

This last function, represents what we call today, ‘management’. For Fayol, the efficiency of the administrative function depends on the application of a certain number of principles. These principles, of which there are 14, are flexible and could be adaptable to the condition of a company, it’s activity and staff. Let’s take for example the division of labour, in order to improve production with the same amount of effort. The defining elements are; authority, discipline, unity of command, hierarchy, order, equity, the stability of the staff and initiative. The list of these tools or concepts is heterogeneous and none is really innovative. What’s new is their consistency, backing up a definition of the activity of management, that we do not find elsewhere in economic literature or in the technical treaties. It is also the thoroughness with which he exposes them.

The administrative organisation of the work proposed by Fayol represents an attempt to define the outlines of the general managerial function at a time where there was still no organised frame work, business schools and not even management science. There were engineers and accountants, however between the people of authority (noblemen) and the miners, there was no one to coordinate, control and plan. Yet, as the the size of the company increased, it became of great importance to fulfil the role of organising the employees and ensure the proper functioning of the company in general. His work helped to legitimize the apparition of a new job, the one of manager.

Among the main precursors of the organisational theories, also appears the American, Frederick Taylor (1856- 1915). He is also one of the classical theorists. Both of their ideas, although controverted, in particular by the human relation theorists, were widely put into practice in companies. Like we saw, Fayol was mainly interested in the problems of managing a company and laid down the basis of the administrative theory. While Taylor studied the organisation of manufacturing shops, he gave his name to “taylorism” (1880’s).

Taylor, like Fayol, was not concerned about identifying the factors that have prevailed in the emergence of the different structures of organisations, but was interested in rules that must be respected to run a company in the most efficient way. So as we will see, Taylor’s theories are a statement of a set of principles too. Principles that we call, ‘principles of scientific management’ (Taylor, 1911). These principles are expressed by the association between science and management in terms of organisation at work. Indeed, Taylor expresses the idea that the relative decisions regarding the activities of production should not be taken into account in an intuitive way, but rather in the light of a scientific analysis of individual tasks.

The starting point of his approach is established by a systematic study of working processes in the workshop aimed on removing unnecessary movement and time-out. The relative ideas to this analysis can be summarized in four points:

1. The horizontal division of work (tasks are simplified and work is divided up) and the search for the best method to realise a task.

2. The scientific selection (recruitment of the best capable individual to perform these tasks), the education and training of the worker in the scientific methods of work.

3. The vertical division of work; sharing the work responsibilities between the workers and the managers, in the way that workers concentrate on the execution of the work and the managers take care on conceiving it, overseeing it and

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