#MODERN ORGANIZATIONAL CHART DESIGN SERIES#

The discovery came in time for the chart to be included in my doctoral dissertation, completing a quest Chandler began when researching his own dissertation on the pioneering financial analyst Henry Varnum Poor.Ĭhandler continued writing about McCallum and the chart in many foundational business-history studies, including his Pulitzer Prize winner, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Harvard University Press, 1977), as well as Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of American Industrial Enterprise (MIT Press, 1962), which is widely viewed as a seminal book in the development not just of business history but also of strategic thought. located the chart and discuss it in “A bridge builder changes a railroad: The story of Daniel Craig McCallum,” Canal History and Technology Proceedings, 2005, Volume 24, pp. In addition, Charles Wrege and Guidon Sorbo Jr. Lawrence University, in upstate New York. With the help of its reference librarians, I located another copy at St.

#MODERN ORGANIZATIONAL CHART DESIGN SERIES#

I was almost ready to give up on my search when the unexpected happened at an academic conference: Peter Knight, a professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, handed out a series of images on the history of capitalism, and I immediately recognized that one was the missing organization chart! I was astonished to learn that Peter had found it in the Library of Congress. Chandler explains that he had not seen the chart himself (at least as of 1988), in Alfred Chandler, “Origins of the organization chart,” Harvard Business Review, 1988, Volume 66, Number 2, pp.

In the course of my search, I learned that Chandler himself had never seen the chart and based his description on a detailed advertisement in the American Railroad Journal. I began searching for it during my doctoral studies at Harvard, writing to archives in New York and Ohio and even combing through Chandler’s personal papers. Chandler identified Daniel McCallum as the originator of the New York and Erie’s pioneering plan and describes the chart in tantalizing detail in several of his books.

Former Harvard Business School professor Alfred Chandler (1918–2007), who helped establish business history as a rigorous academic discipline, described the momentous impact of managerial innovations, such as the organization chart.

Modern organizational chart design