Summary Of Henry Fayol's Work

Summary – Henry Fayol Henri Fayol was born in Istanbul in 1841 to French parents who returned to France in the year 1847. Fayol pursued his academic interests in mining and later graduated as miningengineer from the ‘Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines’ in France. At the age of nineteen Fayol took his first assignment as an engineer at the French mining company, ‘Compagnie deCommentry-FourchambeauDecazeville’. Advancing his career, in 1888, Fayol joined a then struggling mining company Comambault as the Managing Director and held that position for over 30 years until 1918. During histenure at Comambault, Fayol, using his entrepreneurial acumen and management focused thinking turned the once struggling operations into one of the largest producers of iron and steel in France, a nationalasset.1 Fayol was little known outside France until his retirement, when he decided to publish his work for a broader audience. He theorized his personal observations and experiences into acomprehensive theory of administration that defined and categorized management roles and processes. Fayol is therefore widely seen as the early influential contributor to the classical management school ofthought. Fayol argued for the management principles, which if implemented unequivocally, could lead to efficient operation and administration of any organization. He first categorized any industrialundertaking into six generic functional groups - technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting, managerial. He then proposed the famous ‘Five Functions of Management’ to emphasize upon the keyadministrative relationships that exist between personnel and management in any organization2:

Fig.1 Fayol’s Five Functions of Management3 In correlation to the aforesaid five functions of themanagement, Fayol continued further to derive 14 Principles of Management which emphasized on defining in depth various management roles as below4:
1

Economist, The, 'Henri Fayol', The Economist,...