Technology and Management Mechanisms

Most management education still teaches industrial-era thinking: practices that arose with the factory, the railroad, the telephone, and the mainframe, and that outlived the conditions that produced them. This program asks a simple question: How do we teach management thinking from first principles?

To answer it, we trace the history of key technologies and the management mechanisms each gave rise to: how a technology changed what could be coordinated, measured, or delegated, and how management practice adapted. The objective is a way of teaching management thinking from first principles under today's conditions, rather than as inherited convention.