Alfred Du Pont Chandler, the noted global business historian and the former professor of business history at the Harvard Business School, died of cardiac arrest on May 9, at the age of 88, in Cambridge. He wrote extensively - 25 books, written or edited - on management theory with an exclusive focus on innovation and generation of wealth. It is the chance discovery of the papers of his ancestor, Henry Varnum Poor of the Standard & Poor's Corporation, who extensively analyzed the important industry of his day - the railroad - that paved the way for young Chandler to take up studying history of big business organizations and in the process map the birth of "a new economic institution, the managerial business enterprise, and a new subspecies of economic man, the salaried manager." His exploration of business history is so intense that a popular journalist in 1990 iconizes him: "B.C." means "Before Chandler".
In his Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Chandler traced the emergence of the modern vertically-integrated, multi-unit enterprise operating under a single management in the US. He convincingly argued in it that it is the "visible" hand of the American managers that has effectively managed raw material flows, production, marketing and new product development which have led to spectacular growth in sales, and profits, for that matter the very businesses, and in the process this newfound professional management has replaced Adam Smith's "invisible hand" of markets that was accredited as the coordinator of the economic activity. |
