Functions of the Executive: 30th Anniversary Edition

By Chester I. Barnard and Chester Irving Barnard

Book Overview

Most of Chester Barnard's career was spent in executive practice. A Mount Hermon and Harvard education, cut off short of the bachelor's degree, was followed by nearly forty years in the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. His career began in the Statistical Department, took him to technical expertness in the economics of rates and administrative experience in the management of commercial operations, and culminated in the presidency of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company. He was not directly involved in the Western Electric experiments conducted chiefly at the Hawthorne plant in Cicero, but his association with Elton Mayo and the latter's colleagues at the Harvard Business School had an important bearing on his most original ideas.

Barnard's executive experience at AT&T was paralleled and followed by a career in public service unusual in his own time and hardly routine today. He was at various times president of the United Services Organization (the USO of World War II), head of the General Education Board and later president of the Rockefeller Foundation (after Raymond Fosdick and before Dean Rusk), chairman of the National Science Foundation, an assistant to the Secretary of the Treasury, a consultant to the American representative in the United Nations Atomic Energy Committee, to name only some of his public interests. He was a director of a number of companies, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a lover of music and a founder of the Bach Society of New Jersey.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674328035
• ISBN13: 9780674328037
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Demands Executives must meet

Chester Barnard is the Peter Drucker from before World War II. Many of the concepts and of ideas Chester Barnard are essential in the teachings of Peter Drucker and Jim Collins. Like for example the importance attached to defining the purpose of a business and that the purpose of a business is not to make a profit. Profit is an essential condition for survival. Given that the ideas can be found in other more recent books, is it still worthwhile to read this book? It definitely is if you are interested in very precise, almost philosophical formulations, about what the purpose of a company is, and what the essential functions of chief executives are.Chester Barnard writes as a superb academic but was a highly successful Chief Executive. That makes this book unique. There is no better book, yet. One original concept presented is that businesses are alive. This same concept was further developed in the book "The living company " by Arie de Geus and is still an innovative concept to day.

The Functions of the Executive by Chester I.Barnard

The author attempts to develop a comprehensive theory oforganizational behavior. I doubt that such a thing exists;however, his work provides a better perspective on existingbehavioral theories in organizational settings. It is wellresearched with quotations and mention of Mayo, Taylor,Fayol, Pareto, Holden, Koontz, Likert, McGregor, Simon, March, Learned, Sloan and Drucker-to name just a few of the manyauthors cited. The work is divided into :o a theory of cooperation and organizationo the functions and methods of executives in organizationsThe author has some interesting perspectives. For instance,he defines persuasion as:" a-the creation of coercive conditions b) rationalizationof opportunity c) the inculcation of motives."The work could delve more into the dynamics of the corporateculture, goal incongruencies and random events which interferewith even the most carefully construed goals and plansof implementation.This work could be a helpful research for a thesis or majorpaper in organizational structure/design or the dynamics oforganizational behavior/psychology.

Surprises from the past

I am impressed by Barnard's work. He has magnificently put on paper, issues that are taught in any business school today, as if they had always been natural. But it is obvious that the process to deduct from simpler to complex his theory demanded hard work and a life experience. What strikes me most is the immensity of his work, which embodies all the managerial aspects, challenge that would be unthinkable today. But I must say, if only he had done it simpler. Anyhow, it is amazing how often one finds issues such as the recognition of informal organizations, his conception of authority, his conception of efficiency and effectiveness and many others in nowadays oral business tradition. Also, his approach to the organization conceptually and as a system of cooperation formed by individuals, seem strongly logical today, moreover when he considers the relevance of the recognition of informal organizations within the formal ones. This means that the result of his work is not only updated but also in use. I can see how his predecessors as Taylor, Mayo and Fayol influenced him, and I can understand them and value their work much better now. This relation is evident to me, when I remember having criticized Fayol for his "should be" executive. However; I can see clearly now, through Barnard's description of the decision process as a moral activity more than intellectual which helps me perceive Fayol's meaning. This is obvious if one considers the executive process as a balance, more than a technique, seen by its outputs. On the other hand, Barnard's concept of efficiency, considering the distribution of a surplus, whether economic or not, is somehow similar to Mayo's search in his book. The quest for reasons to describe the industrial process is Mayo's passion, which I can clearly identify now with Barnard's efficiency. The same search would apply to Taylor's, though with a different approach. As far as methodology is concerned, although I enjoyed reading his book, his model is by no means simply stated. Maybe because he wanted to prove his academic virtues he explained his theory as complicated as he could. Keeping academic rigor, it could have been presented more concisely. Particularly, when the lasts chapters, being the core of his theory, are presented after extensive analysis and descriptions of variables. Besides, he has to summarize his ideas at the end of the main chapters; it must have been because he had at least a reasonable doubt of the reader's comprehension. On the other hand his endless classifications of the different categories turns to be confusing and misleading. Nevertheless: he describes from a scientific point of view the organization, concept that had been neglected before, and does it from a practitioner's point of view. By doing this he makes a big contribution to management, not only defining business organization but also from a broader scope. I was very impressed by his description of the executive in the cooperative proces

Excellent, optimistic, human-centered management text

Outside the Barnard Society and a few scattered industrial-psychology departments, this book is, unfortunately, no longer taken very seriously. It is used mostly as a historical piece, "see how management theory used to be," or as a foil for the arguments of competing theories.Barnard's perspective is that of human cooperation, management by consensus, and voluntary effort. Employees who are treated well will work well; managers should gain respect through kindness; any workplace conflict signals a failure of the management; and so on and so on. He was either an idealist (as some claim) or a cunning, cynically manipulative defender of capitalist organization during an economic downturn (as others claim). He was either a genius (as some claim) or a businessman with little formal education and professorial prtentions (as others claim).Historically speaking, Barnard's book represents a focus on the human side of employee management, and away from the Frederick Taylor -esque treatment of all employees as production machines. This "softness" of his has made him unpopular today -- just as his failure to acknowledge any "class conflict" made him unpopular in the 60s and 70s.But Barnard is an original, not someone to be pigeonholed into a category, and the ultimate test of a book like this is not authorial intent, but what it does for your mind, and what it does for you as a manager. For me, on both counts, it has been tremendously useful. Reading Barnard gave me powerful intellectual insights -- something I wouldn't even hope to get in today's "management books" -- and has informed the way I think about and deal with coworkers and subordinates on a daily basis. A very valuable read; perhaps one of the first three books I would give an up and coming manager or entrepreneur.

Barnard's Book has a life of its own.

I've been teaching from this book for 29 years. Barnard's insights on authority, executive morals, responsibility, formal and informal organization, organizational purpose, and decision making are fundamental to the understanding of human behavior in the organizational setting. Members of the Barnard Society (U.S.A and International) meet regularly and exchange papers that share their latest insights and applications of his wisdom. Industrial engineering and political science are the predominant backgrounds of the legions of Barnard fans. The book is a difficult read, but worth the effort. As Chester might say, "the benefits-to-burdens ratio is greater than one," so readership grows annually. ........ G. L. Smith, Professor and Chair Emeritus, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, The Ohio State Univeristy