Henri Fayol: The Mining Engineer Who Wrote the 14 Principles of Management

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Henri Fayol was born in 1841 in Constantinople, where his father, a military engineer, oversaw construction of the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn. The family returned to France in 1847, and Fayol graduated from the mining academy in Saint-Étienne in 1860 at 19. Recruited by Stéphane Mony, he was managing the Commentry mine by 25 and spent the 1870s and 1880s studying underground fires, coal seam geology and spontaneous combustion, publishing scientific papers on the subject. In 1888 he became managing director of a conglomerate so close to bankruptcy that its board wanted to abandon coal, iron and steel altogether.

Fayol argued the problem was how the company organized its people, not its coal. He changed the division of labor, let employees work in teams and improved conditions, and by his retirement in 1918 the firm was one of Europe's largest industrial combines. He then directed the Center of Administrative Studies in Paris and in 1916 published Administration Industrielle et Générale, which split any enterprise into six activities, defined management through five functions and set out 14 principles. A 1930 English translation made little impact; the 1949 edition, General and Industrial Management, made him a founder of modern management.

• Fayol separated managerial work from technical, commercial, financial, security and accounting activities.
• His five functions were planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating and controlling, with controlling meaning checking results against the plan.
• Unity of command gave every worker exactly one boss, ending conflicting orders on the factory floor.
• He called for fair pay, treating staff with justice and kindliness, and stable tenure to avoid costly turnover.
• His gangplank let peers communicate directly across the chain of command when speed mattered.