Lyndall Fownes Urwick (3 March 1891 – 5 December 1983) was a British management consultant and business thinker. He is recognised for integrating the ideas of earlier theorists like Henri Fayol into a comprehensive theory of management administration. He wrote an influential book called The Elements of Business Administration, published in 1943. With Luther Gulick, he founded the academic journal Administrative Science Quarterly.
Biography
Youth and military service
Urwick was born in Worcestershire, the son of a partner in Fownes Brothers, a long-established glove-making firm. He was educated at Boxgrove Primary School, Repton School and New College, Oxford, where he read History.
He saw active service in the trenches during the First World War, rising to the rank of Major, and being awarded the Military Cross. Though he did not himself attend the military Staff College at Camberley, his respect for military training would affect his outlook on management in later life. He attended the second conference of the International Industrial Relations Institute held at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928.
Urwick's own prolific writings on management truly began in this period. At this time, Urwick, along with his colleague at Rowntree's, Oliver Sheldon, became active members of the Taylor Society. but it provided Urwick the opportunity not only to lecture widely but to produce his books The Meaning of Rationalisation (1929) and The Management of Tomorrow (1933).
It was also this time that he became particularly keen to promote the writings of Henri Fayol to an English audience. UOP's slogan was Profit on Principle: A British Service for British Business in the application of the Principles of Direction and Control.
thumb|Urwick Orr & Partners (1934)
From the outset, UOP instituted a copy of the Bedaux System and Bedaux Unit, the Point System, in hundreds of factories and offices across Britain and further afield.
Urwick became a well-known enthusiast of management education and management history, and a public promoter of F.W. Taylor and scientific management. So much so that Harry Braverman attacked him in 1974's Labor and Monopoly Capital as the 'rhapsodic historian of the scientific management movement'.
In 1955 Urwick was awarded the Wallace Clark Award. In later years, Lyndall Urwick retired to Australia, where he died in 1983. His papers were donated to the Administrative Staff College, by then renamed Henley Management College. Using the work of General Sir Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton, Urwick maintained that limiting the number of subordinates reporting to an executive ( i.e. restricting the span of control) can do the following: improve executive effectiveness; reduce pressure, inefficiency and incompetence; produce better employee co-operation; and build morale and sense of unity within the organisation. His own view of the education required did not accord with the College as it was finally established, which concentrated on a three-month course for established executives. He would have preferred something much closer to the model of the American business school, involving a longer course and aimed at pre-experience students. It was a continuing frustration for Urwick that England's two ancient universities failed to promote management education.