Douglas McGregor was an management consultant and management theorist who proposed a set of ideas about the practice of management. He was a social psychologist who in 1954 after experience as Chief Executive of Antioch College became Professor of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation he worked with Theodore M. Alfred on a study of management development in large companies. Completing his doctorate, he went on to teach at Harvard where he helped to set up the School's Industrial Relations section
In a survey reported by Huczynski (Management Gurus, Routledge) , McGregor was ranked second in a league table of management writers. The survey was based on the number of citations of writers' work in popular management literature.
A recent leet to BOLA gave the following information on influential management and organisational change writers:
"Theodore Levitt, Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Businss School (Antioch '49) and Warren Bennis, Professor of Business Administration, University of Southern Canlifornia (Antioch '51) were students at Antioch in the late 40's when McGregor was President and taught business administration. Ed Schein was a graduate student of McGregor's in the middle 50's when he (McGregor) taught at MIT.McGregor had a strong influence on Antioch -- his legacy is still felt here. Antioch was always very innovative and "experimental" -- and yet very practical.
In the 1920's, Antioch's most famous president, Arthur Morgan, introduced a work-study program where students alternated between on campus study and work which could be anywhere in the USA. It was (and still is) VERY effective. Morgan was an engineer by profession and had very strong ideas of what education should be about. It was not a coincidence that a man like McGregor would become president of a college like Antioch."
