“What did the Romans ever do for Management?”
Posted in Management on January 4th, 2010 by admin – 1 Comment
A few years back, I wrote an article for a history newsletter – “What did the Romans ever do for Management?” Here is my thesis from that article:
The Romans were adapters of other people’s ideas rather than innovators. They borrowed ideas and leveraged those ideas with formidable organizational skills, rather as Japanese manufacturers reverse engineered European and American products and then applied their own managerial excellence to out-compete the rest of the world in the 1970s and 1980s. Despite being the pre-eminent European power for 600 years, the Romans didn’t invent much. Their architecture, ship designs, ideas of political organization and even religions were largely borrowed from their neighbors and predecessors – often while
