The heart of the business

摘要

Like Douglas McGregor, the inventor of Theory x and Y, Sumantra Ghoshal was a business academic whose reputation grew rapidly after his early death. McGregor taught at Harvard and MIT and died in 1964 at the age of 58; Ghoshal taught at INSEAD and the London Business School and died in 2004 at the age of 55. The parallel does not stop there. Both men's work was firmly based on positive views of Homo economicus. McGregor identified a lasting dichotomy between management styles: Theory x, an authoritarian way, which assumes that workers are natural shirkers; and Theory Y, in which self-motivating individuals work their butts off in pursuit of objectives to which they have become fully committed. He urged companies to adopt Theory Y.