The Capitalist Philosophers

Adrian Wooldrige

In The Capitalist Philosophers Andrea Gabor does a sound job of providing pen portraits of America's important business thinkers.
— Wall Street Journal

E. Thomas Wood

From both the best and the worst of the management theorists profiled here, we re-learn the timeless lesson that ideas have consequences....Though much ink has been spilled about individuals like Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming, and Herbert Simon, Gabor contributes important insights about the lasting significance of their work.
— Bookpage

John T. Landry

The well-balanced portraits examine the subjects' personal and intellectual developments, and take pains to show how these thinkers affected big companies for good and bad....The author has a good eye for the revealing details that both guided and limited her thinkers' ideas.
— Harvard Business Review

Publishers Weekly

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this sweeping account of management theory in the 20th century is how various business leaders and thinkers--the people Gabor (The Man Who Discovered Quality) calls "capitalist philosophers"--wrestle with the two components of economic success: creating efficient systems, and finding and motivating the people to operate those systems. While Frederick Winslow Taylor, Robert S. McNamara and W. Edwards Deming are revered for their belief in processes, people such as Abraham Maslow, and Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo, the two men Gabor credits for creating much of the Harvard Business School's reputation, balance their influence. Gabor, who has worked at U.S. News & World Report and Business Week, does a solid job of giving both sides their due and traces many of today's business ideas to these management pioneers. Equally important, she devotes substantial space to people such as Chester Barnard, the president of the old New Jersey Bell Telephone, and Mary Parker Follett, a civic activist, who are frequently forgotten when it comes to compiling lists of people who shaped the way we think about--and do--business today. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

All movements have their leaders, visionaries, or theoreticians; capitalism is no exception. Business writer Gabor (The Man Who Discovered Quality) has assembled a list of 13 Americans (12 men and one woman)--from scientific manager Frederick Winslow Taylor to "the big idea" man Peter Drucker--who have offered philosophical direction for business in this country over the past century. What do these people have in common? They all studied the same writings; wrote at least one seminal work; and found their way into the hallways of power as consultants, challenging the status quo along the way. Brilliant, opinionated, mercurial, and often self-promotional, they were outsiders who tended to work outside the corporate mainstream. Some of the profiles are thin biographical sketches that allow only the briefest snapshot of these remarkable people. But overall, this is a useful primer allowing us to look back at those individuals who contributed so much to American business and the contemporary workplace. Recommended for all academic libraries and larger business collections.--Richard S. Drezen, Washington Post News Research Ctr., Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

From The Critics

Is management a science or an art? Is it best to run a corporation by the numbers, or must managers somehow enlist the souls of their employees (to say nothing of one another) in the service of making widgets or Web servers?

Management philosophy has gone back and forth on this question for something like 100 years. At one end of the spectrum, Frederick Taylor contends that workers are purely factors of production whose every movement must be choreographed and measured. At the other, Abraham Maslow emphasizes the importance of self-actualization in the workplace.

In this day of Internet startups, when individualism seems to reign supreme (so long as it involves black clothing and retro eyewear), these questions are redolent of some long-ago time when people dragged lunch buckets to oppressive jobs in hulking brick factories. Besides, nobody ever seems to settle the question.

Philosophy, said Henry Adams, consists mainly of "unintelligible answers to insoluble problems," and the same might be said of management philosophies, which seem to rise and fall like hemlines according to the fashion of the day. Lately, in keeping with the hemline analogy, anything seems to go, as long as it's got jargon and a fervent guru to proselytize a given notion.

Yet the question of how to run a business, much like the question of how to live, remains crucially important. Peter Drucker, management guru, was right when he called the corporation "the representative social institution" of our age, and despite the way things may seem in the Internet racket, large corporations are the machines of affluence whose health remains crucial to our economic well-being.

But they're even more important than that, for freedom is always tenuous without prosperity, and Dilbert notwithstanding, the corporation is still our primary engine of wealth - and thus, in some horribly paradoxical way, of the extraordinary array of rights that characterize our society.

The Capitalist Philosophers is therefore a book you might want to force yourself through. Although not as elegantly concise as Robert Heilbroner's classic The Worldly Philosophers, a history of economic thinking with which it seems to invite comparison, Andrea Gabor's survey of a century of management thought gives readers a deep understanding of the intellectual forces that have helped shape the corporation as we know it.

Focusing on 13 big thinkers, but covering a host of lesser lights, as well, Gabor has written a sweeping and powerfully nuanced account of management philosophy in the U.S. As interesting as the ideas in this book are her portraits of the philosophers themselves.

It's almost impossible to resist psychoanalyzing Taylor, for instance. The father of "scientific" management seemed compelled, as an upper-class child who went to work in a factory, to spend the rest of his career brutalizing working men with his pseudoscientific quotas and disingenuous paternalism, de-skilling work and firing people peremptorily as if determined to reinforce the distance between himself and these mere beasts of labor.

Gabor is especially good when writing about Peter Drucker, whom she appreciates for the visionary that he is - even while demonstrating that he makes stuff up. For years I thought I was the only one who had noticed that his tale about how Cadillac hired groups of black prostitutes to make bomb sites during World War II was ridiculous. I checked it out, and it was clearly fabricated, but Gabor has investigated the story more thoroughly, only to reach the same conclusion. Drucker, despite his antipathy toward unions, fits somewhere on the humanistic side of the science-art spectrum, which might be said to run from Taylor to Maslow. Robert McNamara, on the other hand, was a by-the-numbers guy, albeit an extraordinarily thoughtful one with a strong sense of ethics. Chester Barnard and W. Edwards Deming, by contrast, were more at the other extreme, focusing intensely on human relations.

Deming will probably be especially interesting to Net entrepreneurs who live, whether they know it or not, in his world. Gabor explains this succinctly: "The importance of Deming's philosophy to the information age was its radical break with many accepted tenets of management; its insistence on constant change and flexibility; its implicit faith in the ability of individuals and the informal organization to generate new ideas; its opposition to hierarchy and its trappings; and its assumption that the greatest competitive advantage would accrue to companies that help employees achieve their full potential."

The only problem with this book is that it's often heavy going, perhaps in part because of the author's indefatigable thoroughness. The word "genius" is used a bit loosely in the subtitle, but Gabor appears to take it seriously, granting full treatment to the ideas and lives of people who might have been handled more briefly.

Also, the book does not take into account some more recent developments. Various of these "geniuses," for instance, make a persuasive case that money is not a good incentive for workers, especially if you're hiring properly in the first place. Yet the Internet boom suggests that, at least for a good many people, money is an incentive - if not to excel, than at least to go elsewhere.

I also wish Gabor argued more aggressively with some of these thinkers. One of them gripes that giant corporations are run more like socialist states than free-market economies. But perhaps this is because business is seen as war, and democracies, under such circumstances, act rather like socialist states, as well.

This carping aside, The Capitalist Philosophers will reward the tenacious reader with a much-needed historical and intellectual perspective. The only thing missing is a PalmPilot edition.

Business 2.0

The Capitalist Philosophers is essential reading for anyone thinking about hiring a fashionable management consultant. Armed with a few great ideas from the past, you'll be better able to manage the future.