Management Footsteps and Foundations: History, Education Management, and Management Education
This important work will serve to change irrevocably the course, nature and future of management education. For the first time, the foundations of management are brought to life through historical analysis. Never attempted or achieved before, the book takes the reader on a journey through almost the whole of human history, viewed from a management perspective.
The study of management will be utterly transformed by this daringly innovative new paradigm for the understanding of the types of human management, the different approaches, practices and systems, and their development over time. The book also provides a summation of the author’s accumulation of over two decades of experience and knowledge in management education, and three decades of applied action in the world of business.
Dr Ian Waitt is a businessman with over three decades’ experience. During 17 years in education, he taught at school, degree and postgraduate levels. As an international consultant and in business, he has worked across the globe, and his management experience embraces the private, public and voluntary sectors. His business portfolio includes import-export trade, conference and event devising and organising, education management and politico-economic consultancy. He is the writer of a major business biography and the award-winning editor and main author of College Administration, described by The Guardian in 1980 as “the college bible”.
"Ian Waitt has set himself an incredibly ambitious task; nothing less than arguing for, on the basis of detailed historic analysis, the far reaching reform of today’s management education. This impressive and detailed study (and this is just the first of other volumes) explores the Greek and Roman roots of the subject, through an enormous amount of material that includes a mini case study on the 'Inspired Management of the Arab Conquests', and an examination of its 'Applications to Children' (Chapter 16), before showing how it evolved within the context of the Industrial Revolution and ‘Scientific’ Management. Concluding that we need to rediscover a more human-centred paradigm, where ethics and values are recognised – and valued – as being at the core of all decision-making. A (new?) world where there is enough Wisdom to recognise there is more to ‘value’ than just ‘profit’. It is a race against time; where it is an open question whether the internal contradictions of the widely accepted current approach will lead to its collapse, before effective action based on the close study of the evidence put forward by Ian Waitt might – just – help us learn more effectively from past mistakes in time. Before the descendants of ChatGPT take over?"
Dr Bruce Lloyd,
Emeritus Professor of Strategic Management, London South Bank University
"Management is a form of organizing, and in this generous book Ian Waitt begins to write a detailed history of organization. Human beings have arranged themselves into many different social patterns over recorded time, and this unusual volume attempts to catalogue these histories. If you want a book that refuses the simplicities of contemporary management theory, and encourages us to look beyond the narrow confines of the business school for wisdom, then this is for you."
Martin Parker, Business School, University of Bristol
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