Alfred Chandler, 1918 - 2007

A former professor of business history at Harvard Business School, Chandler tended to study the titans of the American economy — General Motors, Dupont, Standard Oil and Sears — but the lessons he extracted from those studies could be, and were, applied to businesses around the world. One business leader compared The Visible Hand to The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Chandler’s book had shown him everything about how organizations succeed or fail.

I met Chandler socially on a number of occasions and was always struck by two things. First was his immense youthfulness. His most recent book came out in 2005, at the age of 87, and he died in the midst of the next. He must have been eighty when we first met and yet he was the liveliest, best informed, most provocative conversationalist I can remember. Installing himself in a comfy seat, hubbub always formed around him; parties went into full swing when Chandler was there. And that was because of his second quality: curiosity. He wanted to know about everything from everyone. The people gathered around him weren’t just business people; he befriended writers, musicians, artists, scientists, anyone with a lively mind. He understood that, at a certain level, you can’t understand business by simplifying it. You have to master its complexity. It was no accident that he was married to an artist.

Chandler did what great thinkers do — which, it turns out, is what great business leaders do too. When studies of thousands of top executives at companies around the world were analyzed, only one cognitive ability alone distinguished star performers. It wasn’t technical expertise, schooling or IQ. It was pattern recognition, the big picture thinking that allowed leaders to pick out meaningful trends and to think far into the future.

From Lessons from a Great Thinker, by Margaret Heffernan

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