Sapient Craft

Henri Fayol, a French engineer, salvaged a distressed mining company by turning around its fortunes at the tail end of the 19th century. Fayol separated management tasks into planning, organization, coordination, command and control. He placed emphasis on specialization and the need for each employee to report to only an individual. He died in 1949.

Sam Walton founded Walmart in 1962. Walton made Walmart the dominant retailer in the world by cultivating employee loyalty, direct interaction with workers and easy accessibility of his stores to ordinary people. He was America's richest man at the time of his death in 1992.

W illiam Hesketh Lever was born in Bolton in the north of England. Lever was among the first manufacturers of soap and was the founding partner alongside James Lever of Lever Brothers. The duo discovered an essential raw material for soap, vegetable oil, rather than tallow. And from this, sunlight soap was manufactured.

Sumanthra Ghoshal wrote that the functional and geographic reporting lines of managers in an organizational structure resulted in ''conflict and confusion'' . In complex organizational settings, ''separated by barriers of distance, language, time and culture, managers find it virtually impossible to clarify the confusion and resolve the conflicts.'' Ghoshal wrote the paper jointly with Christopher Bartlet in 1990. The duo emphasized that companies needed to modify their organizational values and the systems of information channels in the organization before they commence the redesign of the reporting lines. Ghoshal, an Indian, had doctorates from Harvard and MIT, and started his career in Indian Oil. He also worked at INSEAD and the London Business School. He died at the age of 55.