URWICK, Lyndall Fownes
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3rd March 1891 to 5th November 1983
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Biographical Text
Urwick was a manager with the Rowntree company who went on to become Britain’s foremost management consultant.
Urwick was born on 3 March 1891 in Malvern, Worcestershire, the son of Sir Henry Urwick, a partner in a glove manufacturing firm, Fownes Brothers. He was educated at Repton College and then New College, Oxford, graduating BA in 1912. In 1913 he joined Fownes Brothers, and in 1916 was made a partner despite being absent on military service.
An officer in the Territorial Army, Urwick was called for military service upon the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. He fought in several early battles, including Mons, and won the Military Cross. Later he was transferred to staff duties, rising to the rank of major by 1918 and additionally winning the Distinguished Service Order. He also received the OBE in 1919.
By his own account, the most important event of the war for Urwick was reading Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Shop Management by candlelight while in the rear areas behind the trenches. In the principles of scientific management Urwick found the answer not only to the chaos and confusion of war but so many of the inefficiencies and inequalities of peacetime society. He vowed to dedicate his life to management.
At the end of the war Urwick returned briefly to Fownes Brothers and then became secretary to the joint industrial council of the glove-making industry. He also joined the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, and it is likely that this is how he met Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, who invited him to give his first lecture at the Rowntree conferences in 1921. Impressed by Urwick’s ideas, Rowntree recruited him to join Rowntree & Co. with responsibility for reorganising the company’s sales and administrative offices. Urwick worked at Rowntree from 1922-8, where he met and was influenced by a number of figures including Oliver Sheldon and Clarence Northcott.
His time at Rowntree broadened Urwick’s intellectual horizons. He realised the limitations of scientific management, and though he always insisted that management had to be conducted according to scientific principles, he moved beyond pure Taylorism and began to synthesise a wide variety of ideas and theories. These included the holistic management thinking of Harrington Emerson and Henri Fayol, the Christian humanism of Rowntree himself and John Lee, and especially the sociological approach of Mary Parker Follett, whom he came to greatly admire. The result was management based on both science and humanistic principles, a combination which is summed up in his two most important books, Management of Tomorrow and Papers on the Science of Administration.
From 1926-8 Urwick was closely involved in the establishment of the Management Research Groups. Although the MRGs were Rowntree’s idea, it was Urwick who handled the lion’s share of the work, setting up the six groups and serving as their combined secretary. He was now becoming a figure of consequence in the world of management thought. In 1927 he was a member of the British delegation to the World Economic Conference, and in 1928 was appointed director of the International Management Institute in Geneva. He remained in this post until 1933 when the IMI collapsed due to lack of funding.
Returning to London in 1934, Urwick set up his own management consulting practice, Urwick Orr & Partners. Urwick’s firm offered an alternative to the more mechanistic approaches to management and organisation based on the ideas of Taylor or Charles Bedaux, and Urwick Orr grew rapidly. Urwick remained senior partner of the firm until 1965. According to Davenport-Hines (2004,) his approach to consulting ‘tempered Taylorism to British susceptibilities and adjusted his advice to the needs of individual client companies. Indeed he desired major social adjustments so that workers and managers could accommodate the demands of mechanization, and he favoured joint consultation, profit-sharing, and a formal reapportioning of authority between managers and staff.’
Urwick also continued his commitment to the dissemination of good practice in management, begun with the Rowntree conferences and the MRGs. He was general secretary of the International Committee for Scientific Management from 1932-5. In 1937 he helped to found the British Management Council, and in 1938 he was part of the British delegation to the International Management Conference in Washington. During the Second World War he advised the Treasury on the application of scientific organisation and methods, and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. He was a council member of the British Institute of Management from 1947-52.
Urwick retired in 1965, although he continued to have a connection with Urwick Orr until his death, and moved to Australia along with his second wife. He died in Sydney on 5 November 1983.
Urwick was a prolific writer. His best and most visionary work is probably Management of Tomorrow, written at the depth of the Great Depression and published in 1933. The book is partly expression of personal philosophy, partly a setting out of a new system, and partly clarion call to British management to come to terms with the new world of business:
Scientific methods of management are in practice the most economical and the most effective. Thus a preparations of minds has been taking place, where such preparation was most important and where, in the long run, it is likely to prove most influential.
The necessity for such a development is overwhelming. The paradox presented by the present condition of the world's economic affairs is both unprecedented and intolerable. It is unprecedented because for the first time the world community can produce its requirements. Of that there is no question. It is intolerable because men and women have changed. There are greater general knowledge and wider expectations of life which cynicism may easily ferment into despair and disorder. (Urwick 1933: xv)
Urwick defines scientific management as ‘the substitution, as far and to the full extreme which our knowledge allows, of an analysis and a basis of fact for opinion’ (Urwick 1933: 21). Scientific methods of information gathering and analysis should become the norm in every field of management activity, and scientific thinking must become the dominant mode of thought. A full chapter is devoted to research, and two more to organisation. In another chapter, he describes how businesses need to adopt a ‘marketing point of view’. Marketing, says Urwick, is about far more than distribution; it is about finding out what customers want and need, and then providing it to them. He also reiterates his call for more and better training. In the final chapter of the book, Urwick speaks of scientific management as leading to a revolution in the way businesses are organized and governed:
What new forms will be evolved by business and science working in co-operation it is yet too early to say. Knowledge of the facts is insufficient. Thought and experiment are alike hampered by outworn conventions and traditional practices. One thing is certain. They will bear little resemblance either to the forms of the past or to the imaginative structures which theorists have tried to force upon the world. They will be sound and enduring on two conditions only. They must be intellectually consistent with the principles which underlie the achievements of machine production. They must be practically valid, mixed in the crucible of fact and cast in the mould of effective action. (Urwick 1933: 201)
Urwick also deserves credit for being the first to develop the idea of management history in Britain. Historical ideas run like a vein through many of his books, but in the 1940s he set out to produce a systematic history of the management movement so far. The result is the magisterial three-volume work The Making of Scientific Management, written with his assistant Edward Brech (who would himself go on to become a management historian of note). Unlike previous works of synthesis which concentrated on scientific management as an American phenomenon, Urwick and Brech look at how management methods had developed across the globe, and give full credit to European contributions.
Equally important is The Golden Book of Management, potted biographies of seventy pioneers of management thought, beginning with James Watt, Matthew Boulton and Robert Owen and working up to his own time. The figures surveyed come from the USA, Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, Poland, Italy, Australia and Brazil. In some cases, these little sketches are about the only English-language source we have for some of the most important figures in the history of management thought.
Urwick’s first Rowntree lecture on ‘Management as a science’ is a passion affirmation of his belief in the power of science. ‘The whole achievement of science today is but the shadow of a suggestion as to the possibilities of tomorrow’, he declares. ‘Science can help you today in your duties. But far more, you can help science in its duty of establishing and maintaining Truth.’ That means not only applying scientific method in our own work, but sharing what we learn with others so that the whole community may benefit.
Urwick is candid about the dangers of science. As he knew from first-hand experience, the recent war had used science to create horror, from poison gas and flamethrowers to aerial warfare and submarines.
There was a yellow dawn when the remnants of battalions reeled down the long roads cut of the Salient, choking and gasping in front of the first gas attack. We can hear the rattle of the machine-guns in the trenches beyond Ypres, when the Guard regiments came over arm in arm and the ‘mad minute’ swept the pick of a generation out of existence. And we may perhaps be forgiven for a suspicion that all the dogmas and philosophies, the patriotisms and the passions which men have created for their use, are to be judged much like anything else, by their results, that if science is hard and inhuman, romanticism, sentimentalism, and ill-founded philosophies are harder still: while the way of progress lies not in half-knowledge, gained easily and applied in the large. but rather in the painful and detailed winning of this fact and that, the accumulation of a real understanding of the laws and causes which rule the world.
Don’t blame science, Urwick is saying; blame the people who misuse and abuse it. This is where the humanism that is lacking in so much of Taylor’s work begins to come through. Science is a tool to be used; it is down to us as humans to ensure it is used in ways that are right and beneficial. He does not cite Taylor, or refer to scientific management at all, until near the end of the paper; instead, he refers to psychology and the notion of ‘mental constitution’, the ways that we work as people. When he does finally turn to the subject, he insists the world owes Taylor a debt of gratitude for introducing scientific thinking into management, but he moves swiftly on to say that science can be used to give work meaning. In his conclusion, he implicitly criticises Taylor for failing to see this:
It is not repetition, but meaningless repetition that kills; it is not detail, but meaningless detail which is dull. The craftsman has ceased to be master of his tools, and we give him a job card. We cannot go back on machine production. We must go forward, and there is only one clear road. We must, from the surplus which organised production gives us, find more wealth, and more time to fit men for the tasks which that production entails.
That implicit criticism continues in his next paper, ‘The old and the new in business’. ‘There is very great danger’, he says, ‘that certain keen advocates of the modern spirit in management will bring both their ideas, and, what is more important, scientific method as a whole into disrepute by making confused or exaggerated claims for what has been accomplished.’ But he continues his plea for a more rigorous approach to management. Times have changed. Industrial units have grown in scale, and Urwick also identifies the emerging trend towards globalisation.
No enterprise can remain local. Its trading activities may be confined to a definite area. But things which are done at Geneva or Westminster stir it to the foundations, though it may little know the source of the storm. The manager must take a wider vision, have his finger on the pulse of a larger area than the village or the borough.
Times are moving on and business must move with them. Managers must modernise, or see their businesses perish. Sadly, too few people paid heed to his warning.
Major works
The Meaning of Rationalisation, 1929.
Management of Tomorrow, 1933.
(with L. Gulick) Papers on the Science of Administration, 1937.
The Elements of Administration, 1944.
Patterns of Organisation, 1946.
(with E.F.L. Brech) The Making of Scientific Management, 3 vols, 1947-9.
The Golden Book of Management, 1956.
Is Management a Profession?, 1959
Bibliography
Brech, E.F.L., ‘Urwick, Lyndall Fownes’, in M. Warner (ed.), International Encyclopedia of Business and Management, London: International Thomson Business Press, 1996.
Brech, E.F.L. , The Evolution of Modern Management, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2002.
Brech, E.F.L., Thomson, A. and Wilson, J.F., Lyndall Urwick, Management Pioneer: A Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Child, J., British Management Thought, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969.
Davenport-Hines, R., ‘Urwick, Lyndall Fownes’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Thomson, A. and Wilson, J., ‘Lyndall Urwick’, in M. Witzel and M. Warner (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Management Theorists, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Witzel, M., ‘Urwick, Lyndall Fownes’, in M. Witzel (ed.) Biographical Dictionary of Management, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001.
Witzel, M., A History of Management Thought, London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2017.
Original Source
‘Management as a science’, April 1921, Balliol College
‘The old and the new in business’, September 1923, Balliol College
‘The task before industrial administrators’, April 1926, Balliol College
‘Re-organising an existing business’, September 1928, Balliol College
‘Scientific office management’, September 1929, Balliol College
‘What other countries are doing to increase industrial efficiency’, April 1930, Balliol College