Robert S. McNamara and the Evolution of Modern Management

Reprint: R1012G

When the name Robert S. McNamara is mentioned, one thought usually springs to mind: the tragedy of Vietnam. But McNamara’s career was brilliant long before he served as secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson—and long after as well. Spanning five decades, it included leading roles in academia (as a professor at Harvard Business School in the early 1940s), private enterprise (as an executive who helped turn around the ailing Ford Motor Company after the war), government (in his seven-year stint at the U.S. Department of Defense), and humanitarian service (as president of the World Bank for more than a decade).

In this illuminating essay, Rosenzweig, a professor of strategy and international business at IMD, presents McNamara not only as an idealist and an accomplished manager but as the personification of management itself in his time. In his work we see the evolution of the discipline, from the development of frameworks to make sense of markets and organizations, to the embrace of quantitative analysis in decision making, to the growing understanding of human psychology. Vietnam was a crisis that revealed the limitations of managerial thinking at the time, but McNamara never stopped learning. As the discipline of management continued to evolve, so did he. In the end, his willingness to examine the mistakes of the past and learn from them may be his greatest legacy.