SPOTLIGHT ON HBR AT 90

Spotlight

About the
Spotlight Artist
Each month we illustrate our Spotlight package with a series of works from an accomplished artist. We hope that the lively and cerebral creations of these photographers, painters, and installation artists will infuse our pages with additional energy and intelligence to amplify what are often complex and abstract concepts. This month we showcase the “rayographs” of Man
Ray, the modernist giant.
Born in Philadelphia, Ray moved to Paris in 1921, where he experimented with painting, filmmaking, sculpture, and, of course, photography. He created his rayographs by placing objects directly onto photosensitive material and exposing them to light.
View more of the artist’s work at manraytrust.com.

ARTWORK Man Ray, Rayography “Champs délicieux” n°08, 1922, rayograph

hbr.org

Walter Kiechel III is a former editorial director of
Harvard Business Publishing, a former managing editor of Fortune, and the author of The Lords of
Strategy (Harvard Business
Review Press, 2010).

The
Management
Century by Walter Kiechel III

November 2012 Harvard Business Review 63

Spotlight on HBR AT 90

If you want to pinpoint a place and time that the first glints of the Management Century appeared on the horizon, you could do worse than Chicago, May 1886. There, to the recently formed American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Henry R.
Towne, a cofounder of the Yale Lock Manufacturing Company, delivered an address titled “The Engineer as an Economist.”
Towne argued that there were good engineers and good businessmen, but seldom were they one and the same. He went on to assert that “the management of works has become a matter of such great and far-reaching importance as perhaps to justify its classification also as one of the modern arts.”
Towne’s speech heralded a new