A Brief History of Decision Making in Business

Sometime in the midst of the last century, Chester Barnard, a retired telephone executive and author of the Functions of the Executive, imported the term "decision making" from the lexicon of public administration in to the business world. There it began to replace narrower descriptors such as "resource allocation" and "policy making". ... So Barnard -- and such later theorists as James March, Herbert Simon and Henry Mintzberg -- laid the foundation for the study of managerial decision making. But decision making within organizations is only one ripple in a stream of thought flowing back to a time when man, facing uncertainty, sought guidance from the stars.

Read full article here: Blogging on Business, February 3, 2015