McNamara spanned academia, private enterprise, government, and humanitarian service. They speak to the ultimate question that confronts us all: Has my life’s work been important? As we consider the various purposes to which managers’ talents could be applied, and how their contributions may come to be judged, we may gain useful insights by examining the life of one man who grappled with these issues for more than 50 years. The fundamental purpose of management is being debated at leading business schools, where students consider the merits of taking professional oaths that would commit them to pursue goals beyond financial performance.įor those who have chosen management as their livelihood, these are not academic questions. Today the focus has shifted to how management should contribute to society, provide for environmental sustainability, and improve the lives of people at the bottom of the pyramid. In the past decade, as evidence that markets are far from efficient has mounted and much of the wealth created has been wiped out, basic questions about management have resurfaced. Yet as a managerial mission, the pursuit of financial wealth has proved to be unsatisfactory. Shareholder value creation had the advantage of being precisely and objectively measurable-and made CEOs like Roberto Goizueta, Sandy Weill, and Jack Welch legends. Planning and directing were essential, yes, but toward what ends? Organizing and controlling, of course, but in whose interest?īy the 1980s and 1990s, one answer had come to dominate popular thinking: The purpose of management was to enrich a company’s owners. That view shaped the developing profession, but many questions were left unanswered. Leading business thinkers conceived of managers as rational actors who could solve complex problems through the power of clear analysis. In the 1950s and 1960s, to be an able manager was to do four things well: plan, organize, direct, and control. In the end, his willingness to examine the mistakes of the past and learn from them may be his greatest legacy.Ĭlick here for a timeline of Robert McNamara’s legacy.Įvery generation of managers wrestles with questions about its purpose. As the discipline of management continued to evolve, so did he. Vietnam was a crisis that revealed the limitations of managerial thinking at the time, but McNamara never stopped learning. In his work we see the evolution of the discipline, from the development of frameworks to make sense of markets and organizations, to the embrace of quantitative analysis in decision making, to the growing understanding of human psychology. In this illuminating essay, Rosenzweig, a professor of strategy and international business at IMD, presents McNamara not only as an idealist and an accomplished manager but as the personification of management itself in his time. Department of Defense), and humanitarian service (as president of the World Bank for more than a decade). Spanning five decades, it included leading roles in academia (as a professor at Harvard Business School in the early 1940s), private enterprise (as an executive who helped turn around the ailing Ford Motor Company after the war), government (in his seven-year stint at the U.S. But McNamara’s career was brilliant long before he served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson-and long after as well. McNamara is mentioned, one thought usually springs to mind: the tragedy of Vietnam.
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