Henri Fayol and the Principles of Management: A History

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 23, 2026

Picture the company in 1888. By the account in L. Urwick's foreword to the English edition, Commentry-Fourchambault was going downhill. No dividend had been paid since 1885. Its ironworks were losing money, and its coal seams were nearing exhaustion. The man given the job of saving it was a mining engineer. He had been with the firm since 1860.

Henri Fayol's principles of management came out of one French mining and metals company between 1888 and 1916. Fayol ran it as managing director for thirty years. In a 1916 paper he described what he did. He listed five activities (forecasting and planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, controlling) plus fourteen working principles. A practitioner wrote the doctrine. Translators and textbook authors decided how far it traveled. A later generation of researchers tested it against what managers actually do.

What he did next, and how he later explained it, is the origin of the most quoted list in management. For the concept itself, start with administrative management and the functions of management. This article tells where the list came from, and what happened to it. The wider story sits in the history of management.

Timeline at a Glance

The Precursors (antiquity-1860)

Superintendents and ledgers, but nobody called it management

Start with a practice, not a theory. The Arthashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft attributed to Kautilya, devotes its second book to "The Duties of Government Superintendents" in R. Shamasastry's 1915 English translation. It describes a superintendent of accounts with a prescribed office and shelves of account books, and a reward-and-penalty rule that pays a superintendent eight times any gain in revenue and charges him eight times any loss. It also lists about forty ways of embezzlement, which is its way of saying that control is a managerial duty. Scholars debate the text's date and authorship, so treat it as a record of a tradition of administration rather than a dated event.

Keep the precursor apart from the concept. These authors described how officials should run departments. They did not separate "management" as a skill that could be taught across industries, and nobody drew up a list of functions that applied to a coal pit as well as a court. That step needed an industrial firm large enough to be unmanageable by one person's eye, and a manager willing to write down what he did.

What this means for teams today: The oldest management advice is about records and checks: who reports, who verifies, who is rewarded for what. If your team cannot say who checks whose work, you are in the Arthashastra's world, not Fayol's.

Fayol's Pits (1860-1900)

A mining engineer rises from the shaft to the boardroom

The scene is a coal and iron combine in central France. Fayol was born in 1841, went to the National School of Mines at Saint-Étienne, and, according to Urwick's foreword, graduated as a mining engineer at nineteen and joined the Commentry group of pits of the Commentry-Fourchambault Company in 1860. Urwick divides his working life into four periods. From 1860 to 1872 he was an engineer, and a subordinate, working on problems such as the fire hazards of coal mining. From 1872 to 1888 he directed a group of pits and wrote a geological monograph on the Commentry coal measure, published in three volumes between 1886 and 1893. From 1888 to 1918 he was managing director. After 1918 he devoted himself to promoting his theory.

The turnaround is the practical core of the story. When he took charge in 1888, Urwick writes, the works at Fourchambault and Montluçon were losing heavily and the Commentry coal was nearing exhaustion. Fourchambault was closed, Montluçon kept running, Imphy grew into a leading producer of special steels, and the company bought the Bressac pits in 1891 and the Decazeville pits and works in 1892. It became Commentry-Fourchambault-Decazeville, known as "Comambault." Urwick says Fayol himself always attributed the success not to personal qualities but to the steady application of certain simple principles. That is an executive's claim about his own record, and it is the only evidence we have for the link, but it explains why he later wrote principles down.

What this means for teams today: Fayol built the theory after running the business for decades. Write your own management rules from what you have actually done, and test them on the next quarter.

The Doctrine Years (1900-1918)

Two speeches and a paper turn experience into a list

The first public statement came on 23 June 1900. Urwick calls it a paper to the Congrès international des Mines et de la Métallurgie. Fayol's own later account, in the Storrs translation, says the congress gave him the chance to argue that engineering students spent too long on higher mathematics and too little on management. The historian Jean-Louis Peaucelle, in a study of Fayol's method, says the speech was also a call for pooling administrative experience, a call that mining engineers of the time did not answer. Fayol repeated the appeal in 1908 at the society's jubilee congress at Saint-Étienne, in a long speech that, Peaucelle notes, appeared only in summary in the society's publications. Wren, Bedeian and Breeze, in a 2002 paper in Management Decision, argue that readers should go back to these early presentations, and they publish a previously untranslated one, because they show how his reflections evolved.

The full statement came in 1916. Urwick says the monograph appeared in the third issue for that year of the Bulletin of the Société de l'Industrie Minérale, and that the war of 1914-18 delayed its delivery by two years. The society reprinted 2,000 copies, followed by others, and by 1925 15,000 copies had been printed. Fayol finished only the first two of the four parts he planned, which are the ones that hold the doctrine.

Here is what those two parts say. Fayol divides the activities of an industrial firm into six essential functions, namely technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting and managerial. His argument is that the higher you go, the more the job is managerial ability and the less it is technical skill. He then defines management as five activities: to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate and to control. And he explains why management is not taught. In his words, there was no generally accepted theory of it, and without theory no teaching is possible.

The fourteen principles follow. He is explicit that they are not laws: he writes that nothing is rigid or absolute in management affairs, and that the list has no limit in number as long as experience confirms a rule.

The list is Fayol's own, as translated by Constance Storrs, and the right-hand column paraphrases his chapter. Two details are often lost. On the scalar chain, Fayol shows that going up and down every rung of the chain can mean twenty transmissions and weeks of delay, so he allows a direct link between peers, a "gang plank," as long as their superiors approve. And on structure, he observes that as a group grows, each new superior usually has no more than four or five immediate subordinates, a cousin of what later writers call span of control; see span of control when agents do the work.

Fayol knew Taylor's work too. Peaucelle says Taylor's texts were published in France in 1907, and that Fayol tried from then on to explain why his own theory was superior. In the book, Fayol credits Taylor with having rendered great service by drawing attention to the staff mechanism a workshop needs, and objects to Taylor's functional foremen as a breach of unity of command. For the other side of that contrast, read scientific management and the story of its rise and backlash in our history of scientific management.

What this means for teams today: Treat any list of principles, Fayol's included, as a set of questions. His own warning is that a rule has to be applied in proportion to the situation.

The Fayolisme Years (1918-1925)

A retired chief tries to teach the state

After retiring as managing director in 1918, aged 77, Fayol spent his last years spreading the doctrine. Urwick lists what followed. He founded a Centre of Administrative Studies, where eminent men from many professions met weekly with Fayol presiding. Peaucelle gives the Centre's dates as 1919 to 1925 and its address as 100 rue de Vaugirard in Paris, and says its aim was to collect facts and organize collective study of administration. A lecturer named Carlioz gave a series on "Fayolisme" at the School of Higher Commercial Studies as early as 1918. Marshal Lyautey circulated 2,000 copies of a pamphlet applying Fayol's principles to military administration through the French army in Morocco.

The harder task was the government. Fayol was invited by the Under-Secretary of State for Posts and Telegraphs to investigate that department, and his reform study appeared as a pamphlet in 1921. The same year he wrote an article titled "The State's Administrative Ineptitude" in the Revue politique et parlementaire. On 13 September 1923, at the Second International Congress of Administrative Science in Brussels, he delivered an address on the administrative theory in the state, which Sarah Greer later translated for Gulick and Urwick's 1937 volume. At his death he was investigating the French tobacco monopoly.

Urwick adds that early followers tried to cast Fayol against Taylor, and that Fayol told a Brussels congress how false he found that contrast. The speech, Urwick says, led to the merger of two French bodies into one national organization for scientific management. Peaucelle dates that body, the CNOF, to 1925 and reads the compromise as a win for the Taylorites. Peaucelle also argues that the movement was left without the tools its rival had built: Taylorites developed a profession of consultants who could be hired to change a workshop, while Fayol offered reform from above, and his followers struggled after his death. He concludes that Fayolisme failed in France after 1925. Urwick's foreword and Gulick's 1937 volume tell a different story abroad, which is the next era.

The sources differ on the year of the Brussels congress: Urwick places the remark at a congress of "1925," while Gulick's volume dates Fayol's own Brussels address to September 1923.

What this means for teams today: A framework needs people who can apply it for others. Fayol's followers had a doctrine but no consultants to install it, and the rival method took the market.

Fayol in English (1925-1972)

Translators and textbook authors carry the list across the Atlantic

Fayol died in late 1925, aged 84, and the monograph was issued as a book by Dunod that year. For the next two decades his work reached English readers in small doses. The first English edition was the 1929 translation by J. A. Coubrough of The British Xylonite Co., who translated it voluntarily; it was printed by the International Management Institute at Geneva, and a few hundred copies went to Pitman for distribution in Great Britain. No English translation was published in the United States. Gulick and Urwick's 1937 volume gives the Geneva imprint as 1930, a variant worth knowing when you track down a copy.

What did reach America in 1937 was an adaptation. In "Notes on the Theory of Organization," written while he served on a committee advising the President, Luther Gulick asked what the work of a chief executive is. His answer was POSDCORB, a made-up word for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting and budgeting, "adapted from the functional analysis elaborated by Henri Fayol." Gulick had swapped Fayol's list for his own seven, added staffing, reporting and budgeting, and aimed it at public administration. The same book carried Urwick's chapter on Fayol and Greer's translation of the Brussels address.

The full English edition took until 1949, when Pitman published Storrs's translation as General and Industrial Management, with Urwick's foreword calling Fayol the greatest of the European pioneers of management. EBSCO's research starter reports that Fayol's major influence on American management came after the Second World War, and that by the 1950s most management textbooks were organized around his five functions. In 1961 Harold Koontz put a label on that approach. A review of his work lists the management process school first among six schools in his "Management Theory Jungle" article, one that treats management as a process of getting things done through people in organized groups and begins from the functions of managers. Our article on the schools of management thought shows where it sits among the rivals, and Who Is the Father of Modern Management? covers why Fayol's claim to the title is rarely the first answer in the United States.

What this means for teams today: The version of an idea that spreads is the one that is easy to carry. Fayol's five verbs and Gulick's seven letters traveled further than his fourteen paragraphs of nuance.

The Folklore Challenge (1973-present)

Researchers watch managers and the list stops looking so tidy

In 1973 Henry Mintzberg published The Nature of Managerial Work with Harper & Row. His article version, "The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact," ran in the Harvard Business Review in July-August 1975 and won the McKinsey award for the best HBR article of that year. Its opening line, in the HBR reprint, says that if you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you they plan, organize, coordinate and control. Four of Fayol's five verbs, in other words, had become the standard answer. Mintzberg's method was to watch what managers actually did, and the gap between that and the list is the challenge.

That challenge changed the question, not the principles. Fayol never claimed to describe a typical day; his own text says the managerial function is distinct and runs from the head to the members of the organization. The question since 1975 has been whether his list is a description, a prescription or a vocabulary. The most useful answer for a working manager is the third: five words to check whether anything is missing.

His fourteen principles live on in arguments rather than textbooks. Unity of command is the rule teams test whenever someone has two bosses, as in a matrix structure; see the history of matrix and flat organizations. Fayol's warning that dual command wreaks havoc, and that men cannot bear it, is the starting point of every complaint about conflicting priorities. The scalar chain and centralization are the principles that agile and flat structures push back on, and bureaucratic leadership covers the sibling tradition of clear roles and written rules. Span of control returns whenever software agents take over routine work and a manager's team gets larger. Remember Fayol's own caveat: the list never claimed to be complete.

What this means for teams today: Use the five functions as a checklist, not a diary. If you run a week with no planning, no coordination across teams and no control, a gap shows up whatever you call it.

Key People

Key Facts

• Urwick says Fayol was managing director from 1888 to 1918 after joining the Commentry pits in 1860.
• Fayol's paper first appeared in the third 1916 issue of the Bulletin of the Société de l'Industrie Minérale.
• By 1925, 15,000 copies of the paper had been printed in French.
• Gulick's 1937 POSDCORB was adapted from Fayol's analysis of the work of administration.
• Fayol wrote that there is no limit to the number of principles, as long as experience confirms them.
• EBSCO's research starter says most management textbooks of the 1950s were organized around Fayol's five functions.

The Pattern Behind the History

Our synthesis, not published research. Fayol's history shows five moves.

• Practice comes first. Fayol ran the company for 28 years before the paper appeared.
• Doctrine needs carriers. The Taylorites built consultants; Fayol's Centre built discussion, and the rival won in France.
• Translators set the reach. The gap between 1916, 1929 and 1949 shaped who knew Fayol.
• Simple versions travel. Five verbs and one acronym spread more widely than the full text.
• Observation tests the list. Mintzberg's studies of managers asked whether the verbs describe the work.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Check the five functions each quarter. Ask where your team plans, organizes, directs, coordinates and controls, and which one nobody owns.
• Pick one boss per task. If a matrix gives someone two managers, write down who decides when they disagree.
• Let peers talk directly. Fayol's gang plank is the answer to slow escalation: allow it, and tell the superiors afterward.
• Don't divide your own team. Fayol's warning against "divide and rule" within a firm still applies to rival managers.
• Keep the proportion. He says no principle is rigid. Apply each to the situation you are in.

The long view of Fayol is that a manager's own notes became a vocabulary used far beyond his company. For the dated map of what came before and after, see the management theory timeline.