Born the son of a mechanic in 1886 in New England, Chester Barnard left school early to work as a piano tuner for two years, then enrolled at a Massachusetts prep school to prepare for Harvard entry. He did not quite finish his Harvard course due to lack of funds, and instead became a businessman, working for ATT for 40 years and rising to become President of the New Jersey Bell Telephone company in 1927. He undertook government service during World War Two, then in 1948 was elected President of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Although he was not an academic but a practising business leader, Barnard wrote a book called The functions of the executive in 1938, which Andrea Gabor has described as the century's seminal book on corporate leadership (in Capitalist philosophers, Wiley, 2000). Barnard also authored several papers, a selection of which were published in Organization and management: selected papers (1948).
Barnard died in 1961, just two months after he had given an interview to management professor, William Wolf. The resulting book, Conversations with Chester I. Barnard, covered many aspects of Barnard's thinking.