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Chapter 2: Business Control

A Brief History of Business Control

The concept of using systemic business control frameworks to assist management in carrying out business activities has been around for twenty-five centuries (Figure 2.1).

4 th Century BC

13 th Century

15 th Century

18 th Century

19 th Century

20 th Century

  • Sun Tzu

  • Leonado Pisano

  • Luca Pacioli

  • Adam Smith

  • Henri Fayol

  • Frederick W Taylor

  • Henry Ford

  • Toyoda family

  • Alfred Sloan

  • Tomas Bata

  • Max Weber

  • Konosuke Matsushita

  • William Deming

  • Jehangir Tata

  • Joseph Juran

  • Peter Drucker

  • Akio Morita

  • Charles Handy

  • Henry Mintzberg

  • Tom Peters

  • Rosabeth Moss Kanter

  • Kenichi Ohmae

  • Michael Porter and others


Figure 2.1: Timeline for development of management system thinking

Some feel that a significant moment in the history of Business Control was on 14 October 1900 in Sioux City, Iowa and the birth of W. Edwards Deming (Figure 2.2).


Figure 2.2: W. E. Deming
Reproduced with permission from W. Edwards Deming Institute

Deming trained to be an electrical engineer and received a Ph.D. in mathematical physics at Yale. He worked briefly as an engineer in Chicago before becoming a statistician, working in the US Bureau of Census. But fortunately for the world, his continuous quest for understanding deviation from the norm led him to become one of the founding fathers...

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