In this article you’ll learn about 3 famous “management gurus”, one from the academic world, while the others come from the business world.
Probably you knew some of these facts, but it’s always good to refresh your knowledge of these “management gurus”.
Igor Ansoff
Ansoff created the famous “Product-Market Growth Matrix”. Mistakenly considered by many to be one of the American gurus, Ansoff was in fact born in Russia but moved to the USA with his family when he was 18. There he studied and later obtained a PhD in Mathematics, worked for the Rand Corporation and then the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, before moving into academia in the USA and Europe. Ansoff is best known for establishing strategy as a management discipline, and for laying the foundations of modern strategic planning techniques. His approach was, in his time, criticised for being too focused on analytical and planning techniques, but is now highly regarded as appropriate for the fast-changing, complex business world of today.
Ingvar Kamprad
His own name would not be recognised by hardly any member of the general public, his company IKEA is a name recognised by most. Kamprad is also known in the world of academia and business as having established a model for successful entrepreneurship. He took his personal values, developed from the harsh upbringing in his native Smaland in Sweden, and turned these into a set of concepts that laid down how he wanted his company to be managed and how he wanted his workers to behave. Called A Furniture Dealer’s Testament, it is a list of simple but powerful statements that can be applied to most entrepreneurial projects.
Akio Morita
He left the security of his family’s sake business to start a small electronics company so that he could continue what had been until then his amateur enthusiast interest in electronics. He formed a company called Tokyo Tshsushin Kyogu, later to be changed to Sony. Pursuing a policy of risk, innovation, creativity, and intuition, Morita built Sony into one of the modern world’s industrial giants. It was Morita, through the success of Sony, who put Japanese innovation into the world’s consciousness. At the same time, Morita has contributed enormously to the world of management and leadership, through the lessons learned from the success of Sony.
Learning more about these famous management gurus is up to you. If you want to become a good leader you could learn some management principles from the lives of these figures.