By 1888 the Commentry-Fourchambault company, a group of coal mines and ironworks in central France, was running out of road. Ironworks growing in the east and north of the country threatened its plants. The coal from its mine at Commentry, according to the man who ran that mine, was “far from paying its cost of extraction.” The company had paid no dividend since 1885.
That man was Henri Fayol. He had arrived at Commentry in 1860, at 19, straight from the mining school at Saint-Étienne, and had stayed. He knew coal. He did not know iron, and that, according to the historians Jean-Louis Peaucelle and Cameron Guthrie as Ellen O’Connor summarizes their archival study, is one reason he was not the board’s first choice to run the whole company.
The board wanted the Fourchambault works closed. By Fayol’s own later account, he first withdrew his name, because he didn’t want to be the one to close it. The board, in his words as O’Connor quotes them, “appealed to [his] devotion.” He “gave in,” on one condition: he would not close the works until he was “assured, through personal investigation, that the closure was absolutely necessary for the common good.”
He became managing director in 1888 and kept the job until 1918. Fourchambault did close in the end, thirteen years after he took over. The company didn’t. By 1900, according to the management historians Daniel Wren, Arthur Bedeian and John Breeze, it had some 10,000 employees and was one of France’s largest firms by capitalization.
In 1908, speaking to fellow mining engineers in Saint-Étienne, Fayol gave his explanation. In 1888, he said, the company had been “almost resigned to closing and abandoning its factories and suspending operations in the mines when there was a change of management.” Then: “It was with the same mines, the same factories, the same employees that the Company went into decline before 1888 and with which it has recovered since that date.” The decline and the revival, he said, “were due solely to the administrative procedures used.” The words come from the English translation Wren, Bedeian and Breeze published in 2002, from a copy Fayol’s son found in his father’s papers.
That was Fayol’s account, and other things had changed too. As Commentry’s coal ran down, the company bought mines at Brassac in 1891 and Decazeville in 1892, according to a Montluçon local history society; Decazeville went into the company’s name. Its works at Imphy developed specialized steels that opened new markets in military equipment and precision instruments. And O’Connor notes that Fayol wrote his theory up in 1916, at 75, looking back on his experience: “This is not a scientific process.”
But the claim gave him his subject. In a work he published in 1916, he defined the job he had been doing with five verbs: “Administrer, c’est prévoir, organiser, commander, coordonner et contrôler.” To manage is to plan, organize, command, coordinate and control.