Is it time for a Nobel Prize in Management thinking and writing?

19 Apr

Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, disdained business management. Even though his family owned a grocery store, an engineering factory, and an oil company. His apathy for management is often used to oppose the creation of a Nobel Prize in the subject.

But this narrative, which chides Management as boring and trifling, is unfounded and difficult to uphold.

Management is not boring.

“The father of the computer” was a management thinker. Charles Babbage’s book, On The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (1832) is a management classic.

Babbage studied work and labor. He wrote about the manufacturing of glass cutting, needles, shoes, scythes, weaving, and more. In doing so, he discovered that universal “principles [of labor] pervade many establishments.”

His idea for the “Analytical Engines,” which are generally considered to be the first computers, was borrowed from the French merchant weaver Joseph-Marie Jacquard.

The Jacquard machine was a loom used for weaving complex patterns in textiles. It operated with programmable punched cards. The mathematician Ada Lovelace (1843) famously observed: “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

Management adds real value to society.

Management thinking quintupled the world’s ability to produce, organize, and measure. It lightened physical toil, introduced higher wages as well as shorter working hours. Management thinkers demonstrated that work can be expressed and approached logically. In his landmark book, The Practice of Management (1954), Peter Drucker echos this wisdom: “Production is not the application of tools to materials. It is the application of logic to work.”

It took 100 years for Babbage’s invention to be reused by the American engineer Herman Hollerith and his punch-card manufacturers, International Business Machines (IBM), to pioneer the first electronic computer: ENIAC. ENIAC weighed 30 tons and filled a 50-foot long basement room.

Should Management have a Nobel Prize?

The impetuses management thinking gives are often overlooked. Management did not only play a crucial role in the invention of the computer. No, the ubiquitous Universal Product Code, for example, was created in cooperation with the management consulting firm, McKinsey & Co.

Management is a sui generis liberal art. When paired with the natural sciences — and practiced responsibly — it improves the way the world works together. As such, it is ill-suited for a Nobel Prize, which furnishes subjects with false authorities and rules that impede innovation.

Management should learn from the mistakes of Economics. The Nobel Prize in Economics was established in 1968 by the Swedish Central Bank. It is the most recent addition to the Nobel series. The legendary Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) confessed in his Nobel acceptance speech in 1974: “if I had been consulted whether to establish a Nobel Prize in economics, I should have decidedly advised against it”.

Hayek warned that the Prize bestowed an improper fashion, prestige, and authority to his social science. Once awarded, ”politicians, journalists, civil servants and the public generally” could be misled.

To answer the Queen’s famous question in 2008, how come no one saw the financial crisis coming?: The ordinary economists had foreseen it, but they were treated facetiously. The general public merely listened to those economists distinguished by Alfred Nobel’s Prize — who probably disdained economics, too.

Resources

**Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links. This means that at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.