Organized endeavors directed by people responsible for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling activities have existed for thousands of years. The Egyptian pyramids and the Great Wall of China, for instance, are tangible evidence that projects of tremendous scope, employing tens of thousands of people, were undertaken well before modern times. The pyramids are a particularly interesting example. The construction of a single pyramid occupied more than 100,000 workers for 20 years. Who told each worker what to do? Who ensured that there would be enough stones at the site to keep workers busy? The answer to such questions is managers. Regardless of what managers were called at the time, someone had to plan what was to be done, how to organize people and materials to do it, lead and direct the workers, and impose some controls to ensure that everything was done as planned.
It is not very difficult for us to imagine modern management techniques in the days of the pharaohs. True, we can get a laugh or two thinking of profit sharing and other twentieth-century terms appearing in the ancient land of the Nile, but the generic relationships of people managing people must have borne a great many similarities. In fact, many ancient documents have been translated to reveal that, through the ages, wherever people have worked together to accomplish their goals, many of the same phenomena have prevailed.
It is not very difficult for us to imagine modern management techniques in the days of the pharaohs. True, we can get a laugh or two thinking of profit sharing and other twentieth-century terms appearing in the ancient land of the Nile, but the generic relationships of people managing people must have borne a great many similarities. In fact, many ancient documents have been translated to reveal that, through the ages, wherever people have worked together to accomplish their goals, many of the same phenomena have prevailed.
