Henri Fayol and Herbert Simon

Henri Fayol and Herbert Simon

Henri Fayol was a management theorist from France. He was primarily interested in labor organization and during the early part of the 20th century what he had to say was very influential (Wren, Bedeian, & Breeze, 2002). He was also involved with and interested in competition and the control of the costs of production. Most importantly, however, Fayol was the first individual to identify what he considered to be the four functions that are used in management. These are leading, controlling, organizing, and planning (Wren, Bedeian, & Breeze, 2002). He worded it somewhat differently back then, but the message was the same. Fayol was interested in finding more management principles, and he believed that there was no actual limit to how many management principles could be located or how much help they could be when it came to helping a company to succeed. He eventually created 14 management principles and evolved groundbreaking work in what is commonly called classical management theory (Henri, n.d.).

Unlike Fayol, Herbert Simon was an American, and he was involved in computer science, psychology, philosophy, and many other subject areas (Simon, 1997). Primarily, he is remembered for the contributions he made in the area of microeconomics (Simon, 1978). He created organizational decision-making, which was very significant, and the ideas that he came up with in that area are still known and accepted today. Uncertainty in this particular area was another one of the concepts that Simon introduced and that is still important today (Simon, 1991). Most of the works that he wrote concerned themselves with decision-making, and he expended on this concept and worked with it for most of his life. It was so important for him that he revisited it in many different ways throughout his life and the books and articles that he wrote.