Don't Forget Herb Simon!
PITTSBURGH. As a CMU grad I was pleased to read this paragraph on the Tom Peters (in a post appropriately titled "Stuff") blog about the late nobel-prize winning Professor who helped put CMU on the map, both attracting me to the school and giving my degree value..."HERB SIMON GOT THERE FIRST. In a recent Fortune article Geoffrey Colvin says that if there had been a nobel prize in management, Peter Drucker would have "won it every year." How silly. A "management guru" did in fact pocket the economics Nobel in 1978...Herb Simon of Carnegie Mellon (defining book: Administrative Behavior); I had the privilege of interviewing him for In Search of Excellence. Other worthies besides Simon (and Drucker) would include rigorous academics such as Doug MacGregor (a shoo-in), Warren Bennis (also a shoo-in), Alfred Chandler (shoo-in), James March, Karl Weick, Henry Mintzberg (shoo-inÂmay get the economics prize someday), Graham Allison, Richard Neustadt, and Michael Porter (also an economics candidate). But, mostly, thank God there is no "Management Nobel." Make no mistake: Management is an art ... not a science. (Frankly, it's not all that clear to many, even those in the field, that economics is a "science.")"
Update: From the comments section of the Tom Peters blog, Posted by Tom Peters: "Justin, "yes!" to Simon's interdisciplinary genius. If ever someone merited the term "polymath"...
Links:
Herb Simon's CMU biography
Amazon's Peter Drucker Search
Tom Peter's Post "Stuff"
posted by Sully @ 12/19/2005
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home