From the Archives: Tuck conference

This Fri­day, the Tuck School of Busi­ness will host its an­nual Tuck India Busi­ness Con­fer­ence, a meet­ing "at the fore­front of ad­dress­ing the ris­ing pre-em­i­nence of India in global busi­ness," ac­cord­ing to the school's web­site. The con­fer­ence will in­vite promi­nent lead­ers, en­tre­pre­neurs and in­vestors to dis­cuss busi­ness strate­gies in the con­text of an eco­nom­i­cally emerg­ing India.

One hun­dred years ago, Tuck was given a sim­i­lar op­por­tu­nity to host one of the first busi­ness con­fer­ences on a then-emerg­ing con­cept that echoes through­out the busi­ness world today: sci­en­tific man­age­ment, the con­cept of ef­fi­ciently max­i­miz­ing labor and re­sources to their full po­ten­tial.

It was a new the­ory of man­age­ment de­vel­oped by Fred­er­ick Tay­lor and had been dis­cussed in the realm of tech­ni­cal so­ci­eties but never in the con­text of real-world ap­pli­ca­tions. Tuck sought to host the first pub­lic con­fer­ence on the sub­ject that would in­vite busi­ness lead­ers and man­u­fac­tur­ers to dis­cuss its prac­ti­cal use in busi­ness.

"Some are con­vinced that it is the most promis­ing de­vice yet pre­sented for in­creas­ing the ef­fi­ciency of both man­age­ment and labor and con­se­quently for in­creas­ing at the same time prof­its and wages," H.S. Per­son, for­mer di­rec­tor of Tuck, told The Dart­mouth at the time. "Oth­ers be­lieve it is too ideal for prac­ti­cal ap­pli­ca­tion."

Schol­ars grap­pled with the the­ory of sci­en­tific man­age­ment until the 1930s, when it was deemed ob­so­lete as a dis­tinct school of thought. Still, many of its themes of ef­fi­ciently max­i­miz­ing re­sources re­main ap­plic­a­ble today and con­tinue to en­dure. Few back then would have imag­ined, though, that India, then still a British colony, would uti­lize these eco­nomic the­o­ries to be­come a ris­ing power in the world econ­omy.