Management, Business

The Military Analogy

The analogy to military leadership implied that the role of corporation presidents, board chairmen, managing directors, and senior executives was to control organizations through a descending chain of command. That chain of command ran down the corporate hierarchy from the board of directors to the president, through his staff, to vice presidents in charge of various functions or divisions, and then through middle management to supervisors and employees. When Thomas J. Watson, Jr., succeeded his father as chief executive of IBM in 1956, he was dismayed to learn that “by the mid-1950s just about every big corporation had adopted this so called scientific management—the application to business especially of engineering principles. It was modeled on the military organization going back to the Prussian army in Napoleonic times” (Watson 1998, 429). Watson noted that “in this sort of arrangement, line managers are like field commanders, their duties are to hit production targets, beat sales quotas, and capture market share” (ibid).

The chief executive's role was to set strategic [Page 950]goals and ensure their effective implementation. As Chester Barnard (1886–1961), president of New Jersey Bell Telephone and the Rockefeller Foundation, argued in his influential book The Functions of the Executive, the business leader's role, like the military general's, was to identify those strategic factors “whose control, in the right form, at the right place and time, will establish a system or set of conditions which meet the purpose” (Barnard 1938, 9). The dominance of the directive leadership style was reinforced by the fact that many of the largest U.S. corporations had been founded by bold entrepreneurs such as Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, A. Montgomery Ward, Thomas Edison, William Randolph Hearst, and David Sarnoff, whose powerful personalities and obsessions with controlling the fate of their companies easily accommodated a command-and-control approach.

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