Lyndall Urwick

"In 1931, under the title "Onward Industry," Messrs. James D. Mooney and Alan C. Reiley published a full-length book examining the comparative principles of organization as displayed historically in governmental, ecclesiastical, military and business structures... Their book constitutes the first serious attempt to deal with the subject comparatively and synoptically."

"This paper has a threefold purpose:"

"Administration has to do with getting things done; with the accomplishment of defined objectives. The science of administration is thus the system of knowledge whereby men may understand relationships, predict results, and influence outcomes in any situation where men are organized at work together for a common purpose. Public administration is that part of the science of administration which has to do with government, and thus concerns itself primarily with the executive branch, where the work of government is done, though there are obviously administrative problems also in connection with the legislative and the judicial branches. Public administration is thus a division of political science, and one of the social sciences."

"At the present time administration is more an art than a science; in fact there are those who assert dogmatically that it can never be anything else. They draw no hope from the fact that metallurgy, for example, was completely an art several centuries before it became primarily a science and commenced its great forward strides after generations of intermittent advance and decline."

"To hold a group or individual accountable for activities of any kind without assigning to him or them the necessary authority to discharge that responsibility is manifestly both unsatisfactory and inequitable. It is of great Importance to smooth working that at all levels authority and responsibility should be coterminous and coequal."

"No superior can supervise directly the work of more than five or, at the most, six subordinates whose work interlocks. The reason for this is simple. What is supervised is not only the individuals, but the permutations and combinations of the relationships between them. And while the former increase in arithmetical progression with the addition of each fresh subordinate, the latter increase by geometrical progression. If a superior adds a sixth to five immediate subordinates he Increases his opportunity of delegation by 20 per cent, but he adds over 100 per cent to the number of relationships he has to take into account. Because ultimately it is based on the limitations imposed by the human span of attention, this principle is called The Span of Control."

"[Functionalism is a] dividing up of activities as to kinds."

"The fact that these principles, collected from the writings of half a dozen different people, many of whom made no attempt to correlate their work with others, can be presented in a coherent and logical pattern is in itself strong evidence that there is a common element in all experience of the conduct of social groups, that a true science of administration is ultimately possible."

"Scientific Management is not a new "system," something "invented" by a man called F. W. Taylor, a passing novelty." It is something much deeper, an attitude towards the control of human systems of co-operation of all kinds rendered essential by the immense accretion of power over material things ushered in by the industrial revolution..."

"An attempt will also be made to fill in some of the gaps in the first volume. The thirteen men and women herein described are by no means all and not necessarily the most distinguished of those who have contributed to the movement. It seems to have a special attraction for two types of mind—the employer or technician who finds in the direction of industrial work a responsibility to his fellows which outweighs in interest the commercial or technical aspect of his task, and the scientist specialising in some particular field, who is not satisfied to remain purely a specialist, but feels that the intellectual methods and the integrity of the genuine research worker have a wider contribution to make in the crisis which faces our civilisation."

"Such men and women are not confined to any one country or to any one period. They are in the great tradition of humanism. Their work is as typical of the social heritage of the twentieth century as the work of Michael Angelo and Leonardo da Vinci was typical of the Renaissance. That heritage can neither be understood nor preserved, unless it is seen as the unified gift of many minds bearing on every aspect of life which has engaged man's long search for goodness, beauty and truth."

"It is this detachment, this use of comparison, his faith in the possibility of applying scientific processes of thought to the organisation of industry, which constitute Babbage's unique contribution to the advancement of management. More than half a century before Taylor was to illuminate the same point, with far greater effect because he was a practising engineer, Babbage had stumbled on the underlying truth that there are general principles applicable to the manufacture of products by machinery, and that it is an understanding of these principles rather than the technical knowledge of how to make a particular article which is of the first importance."

"The concept of management as a specific body of knowledge and practice forming the basis of a specialised profession ... Wherever human activities are carried out in an organised and co-operative form, there management must be found."

"If they (the ) had not been (aware of human problems involved) — and Taylor either failed to encounter, or to recognize the significance of, the early work in industrial psychology contributed by Walter Dill Scott, Hugo Munsterberg, and others — there was the amazing fact that one of them, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, happened to fall in love with a girl who was a psychologist by education, a teacher by profession, and a mother by vocation. I know of no occurrence in the whole history of human thought more worthy of the epithet "providential" than that fact. Here were three engineers — Taylor, Gantt, and Gilbreth — struggling to realize the wider implications of their technique, in travail with a "mental revolution," their great danger that they might not appreciate the difference between applying scientific thinking to material things and to human beings, and one of them married Lillian Moller, a woman who by training, by instinct, and by experience was deeply aware of human beings, the perfect mental complement in the work to which they had set their hands."

"There is nothing which rots morale more quickly and more completely than poor communication and indecisiveness - the feeling that those in authority do not know their own minds. And there is no condition which more quickly produces a sense of indecision among subordinates or more effectively hampers communication than being responsible to a superior who has too wide a span of control."

"Planning is essentially the analysis and measurement of materials and processes in advance of the event and the perfection of records so that we may know exactly where we are at any given moment. In short it is attempting to steer each operation and department by chart and compass and chronometer – not “by guess and by God”."

"Before Mary Follett, industrial groups had seldom been the subject of study of political or social scientists. It was her special merit to turn from the traditional subjects of study - the state or the community as a whole - progressively to concentrate on the study of industry... Her approach was to analyse the nature of the consent on which any democratic group is based by examining the psychological factors underlying it. This consent, she suggested, is not static but a continuous process, generating new and living group ideas through the interpenetration of individual ideas."

"MAJOR URWICK and Dr. Metcalf have rendered a conspicuous service by editing this collection of Mary Follett’s lectures on business management. They contain teaching which was of importance when the lectures were delivered, and which many people felt should be preserved in a collated form and given a wider public. The circumstances of today have increased that importance. Many people are being called upon to fill new administrative posts, and these lectures teach the principles which should underly all administrative method."

"Another exponent of the traditional classical approach is Lyndall Urwick, a British consultant. Urwick concentrated less on building an entire philosophy of management and more on collecting the basic ideas of earlier writers into an eclectic summary of classical concepts. He tediously compared the frameworks of Fayol, Taylor, Mooney and Reiley, and others and found a remarkable consistency in their conclusions... In a tabular presentation of statements from other writers, Urwick arrived at 29 principles of administration."

"Lyndall Fownes Urwick (1891–1983) has been one of the most important figures in the development of modern management practices and thought. Central to his work was a passion for spreading the gospel of systematic and ‘scientific’ management through his activities as a management consultant, through his efforts in developing management institutions, and perhaps most of all, through what he later called his ‘mission at large’ in taking ‘modern’ management to managers and the wider public... Organization theory was his particular concern and provides his main standing in history. The principles were based broadly on managerial tasks, together with some general organizational precepts such as the correspondence of authority with responsibility."