By the end of the 1930s, professors were teaching management at Harvard and MIT, and prominent business leaders such as Alfred P. Sloan of General Motors and Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck was practicing management as a this¬crete discipline. Then World War II broke out, and military officials were sud¬denly confronted with the massive, complex problems of aligning people and materials all over the globe. To help make these critical decisions, British and U.S. Military managers turned to a relatively undeveloped field of management theory, quantitative management, and an approach that uses mathematical tech¬niques, statistical tools, and information aids to solve management problems. This approach was an outgrowth of the scientific management belief in strict measurement and in using formulas, but it went beyond by involving a variety of disciplines and attacking a variety of problems. Although quantitative manage¬ment had been explored during World War I had studied ways of applying mathematical and it wasn't until World War II that managers actively pursued such applications. After World War II started, mixed teams of researchers representing such diverse disciplines as astrophysics, physics, physiology, and mathematics worked on England's military problems. They contributed to the war effort by improving Britain's early warning radar systems, by helping to determine con¬voy size, and by helping to plan bombing raids. Within a few years, the United States began to apply similar techniques to naval mining and antisubmarine operations. Because quantitative management was so valuable to the U.S. Mili¬tary during the war, officials continued using these techniques after the war in studying aerial operations and in other applications. Business managers on both sides of the Atlantic became interested in quantitative management after the war. For example, industrial managers in Great Britain today use quantitative management techniques to increase production efficiency and develop new mar¬kets in the iron and steel industry, in railways, in textiles, and in other areas, often with government sponsorship. And since computers now do most of the computation and statistical work, managers can more easily learn and apply a wide spectrum of quantitative management techniques.
