A telephone company president wrote the book that redefined organizations as systems of cooperation, not command.
Chester Irving Barnard never earned a college degree. He attended Harvard on a scholarship, studying economics for three years, but left in 1909 without completing his requirements. He went to work for American Telephone and Telegraph, beginning as a statistician and rising through the ranks until he became president of the New Jersey Bell Telephone Company in 1927.1
In 1938, Barnard published The Functions of the Executive, based on a series of lectures delivered at Harvard. The book was unusual for its time. While Frederick Taylor and his followers treated organizations as machines to be optimized, Barnard treated them as living systems that depended on the voluntary cooperation of their members.2
His central argument inverted the prevailing model of authority. Barnard proposed that a directive from a superior only has authority if the subordinate accepts it. He called this the "acceptance theory of authority," and it placed the foundation of organizational power in the willingness of workers, not in the position of managers.3
Barnard defined a formal organization as "a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of two or more persons." Three elements were necessary for any organization to exist: communication, willingness to serve, and a common purpose. Without any one of the three, the organization would fail.4
An informal poll of the Fellows of the Academy of Management voted The Functions of the Executive the second most influential management book of the twentieth century, behind only Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management.5 During the Great Depression, Barnard directed New Jersey's state relief system. He later served as president of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1948 to 1952. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1939 and died on June 7, 1961.6