The Human Side of Enterprise PDF
Preview The Human Side of Enterprise
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 http://www.archive.org/details/humansideofenterOOmcgr D^uman Cfhe Side of Enterprise DOUGLAS McGregor School of Industrial Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology McGRAW-HILL BOOK COMPANY, INC. New York Toronto London 1960 THE HUMAN SIDE OF ENTERPRISE Copyright © 1960 by the McGraw-Hill Book Company. Inc. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission of the publishers. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-10608 2223242526 VBVB 7543210 45092 TO MY WIFE PREFACE Some years ago during a meeting of the Advisory Committee of MITs School of Industrial Management, Alfred Sloan raised some questions related to the issue of whether successful managers are — — bom or made. I was aware as he was that his questions were not easily answered. The discussion, however, served to sharpen certain mterests I had had for some time in a systematic examina- tion of the many cormnon but inconsistent assumptions about what makes a manager. In 1954 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation made a grant to Alex Bavelas and me to explore some of these ideas more fully. Bavelas' interests lay in some laboratory experiments, while mine centered on research in industry, but they had a common focus on a more adequate theory of management. After Bavelas went to the Bell Laboratories in 1956, the labora- tory work waned. I am not an experimentalist. Another colleague, Theodore M. Alfred, and I continued a comparative study of the operation of management development programs in a number of Vi PREFACE large companies. The subjects were a group of former Sloan Fel- lows, but our studies ranged widely within their companies as we sought to learn more about the way in which theories and practices within different organizations influence the making of managers. These studies are not yet complete, but this book has grown out of them and is to a large extent the fruit of Mr. Sloan's questions and the opportunity to pursue them afforded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. It seems clear to me that the making of managers, in so far as they are made, is only to a rather small degree the result of man- agement's formal efforts in management development. It is to a much greater degree the result of management's conception of the nature of its task and of all the policies and practices which are constructed to implement this conception. The way a business is managed determines to a very large extent what people are per- ceived to have "potential" and how they develop. We go off on the wrong track when we seek to study management development in terms of the formal machmery of programs carrying this label. Without in the least minimizing the importance of the work that has been done to improve the selection of people with managerial potential, I have come to the conviction that some of our most un- portant problems lie elsewhere. Even if we possessed methods enabling us to do a perfect job of selecting young men with the capacity to become top executives, the practical gain for industry would be negligible under today's conditions. The reason is that we have not learned enough about the utilization of talent, about the creation of an organizational climate conducive to human growth. The blunt fact is that we are a long way from realizing the potential represented by the human resources we now recruit into industry. We have much to accomplish with respect to utili- zation before further improvements in selection will become impor- tant. This volume is an attempt to substantiat—e the thesis that the human side of enterprise is "all of a piece" that the theoretical
The list of books you might like
