By Art Kleiner
Nineteen fourteen was not just the beginning of the first World War, the conflict that set the tone for the remainder of the century. It was a turning point in many other ways. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin were ascending. Each, in his own way, spoke of a universe more progressive, more evolutionary, and more responsive to the influence of humankind.
The modern business organization — with owners separate from managers, and employees numbering in the hundreds instead of the tens or dozens — was less than 60 years old. Already, it had mobilized people and technology to produce unprecedented wealth, not just for owners but for consumers. The nature of government also was changing as smaller nations merged or expanded into larger and more complex nation-states, with new kinds of government agencies to run their administrations (and in some cases, empires).
Economically, much of the world was mired in a mild recession, but people felt optimistic and a bit awestruck by the changes around them. The Panama Canal had opened only one year earlier. Miraculous new inventions like the electric light, the telephone, the automobile, and the motion picture were rapidly becoming commonplace. Only a few years before, two men had flown a motorized vehicle through the air in North Carolina. The mass-market magazine, then about 30 years old, and the plate-glass window, which allowed supermarkets and department stores to colorfully showcase consumer goods, had enabled a bold new profession called marketing. That term first emerged in 1914 at Harvard's new business school, which had opened just six years before.
Northwestern University, a few miles north of Chicago, had no formal business school, but its faculty included Walter Dill Scott, one of the pioneering management academics of his time. Scott, then 45, was a professor of psychology. He had written the first books published in the United States on advertising practice (Theory of Advertising, 1903) and on advertising psychology (Psychology of Advertising, 1910). Scott understood the human component of business, not just in advertising but in all management. He was the first to write about the way advertising could trigger deeply held emotions and instincts, and he scoffed at the idea, put forth by "scientific management" consultants like Frederick Taylor, that diverse people could fit interchangeably into mechanized production systems like cogs in a machine. Instead, Scott suggested, effective management would evaluate people, evaluate jobs, and focus on making the right match between the two.
Edwin George "Ed" Booz, born in 1889, entered Northwestern as a freshman in 1908. During the next six years, he earned a bachelor's degree in economics and a master's in psychology; he also became Walter Dill Scott's prot
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