Builders and Dreamers: The making and Meaning of Management

Countries with a high population and high employment, like Flanders, Genoa and the Swiss cantons, began exporting their surplus young men as paid soldiers. (p. 138)

The problem of modern economic theory is that it fails to discuss the movement of the most important factor in production, labors.

In the eighteenth century the modern military system emerged in the eastern German state of Brandenburg-Prussia, one of the countries that had suffered most in the Thirty Year War. (p. 139)

History shows that the strongest military powers often emerge from the ashes of war and suffering. To be strong, you have to suffer first.

(W)ar should be treated like business …: the military force at a general’s disposal were his ‘capital’, and should be employed in such a way as to give him the maximum ‘return on investment’. (p. 141)

Achieving the balance between coordination and control, between flexibility and structure is, …, one of the central tasks of top management. (p. 146)

Our theory provides a quantitative framework to understand the various tradeoffs.

Different time and places have come up with different solutions. All the organization systems we discuss above were successful, for a time. Then they failed, largely because the guiding hand at the top became a dead hand; lacking guidance and leadership, the perfect organization becomes no more than a rusty implementation. (p. 150)

From our theory, duration of a project cannot be too long. That is why life doesn’t go on forever. Each generation produces offspring instead. Life starts anew.

It may seem an exaggeration to state that the lonely deaths of the Tsar and his family in Siberia can be blamed on excessive division of labour, but there is a causal chain nonetheless. (p. 210)

History is much less random than many would suggest. The apparent randomness is partly due to our lack of knowledge, but mainly due to our lack of understanding. This lack of understanding is, in part, due to the lack of will from the dominant party of the time to acknowledge the unfairness of the society at that time. This lack of will makes the objective understanding of history very difficult. The best history book I read is The Fate of nations by Paul Colinvaux. Another good book on history is Guns, Germs, and Steel. Both are written by ecologists.

The beauty of history is its endless flexibility. It offers no hard and fast certainties; what it offers instead is a fertile ground for examining and testing ideas and concepts and analyzing information. Everything in business is new, and yet everything in business is as old as the hills. Accept and understand that paradox, and you will have added a powerful new weapon to the armoury of your business skills. (p. 288)