Gulick notes that organization of specialized workers can be done in four ways which are:
• By the purpose the workers are serving, such as furnishing water, providing education, or controlling crime. Gulick lists these in his organizational tables as vertical organizations.
• By the process the workers are using, such as engineering, doctoring, lawyering, or statistics. Gulick lists these in his organizational tables as horizontal organizations.
• By the clientelle or material or the persons or things being dealt with, such as immigrants, veterans, forests, mines, or parks in government; or such as a department store's furniture department, clothing department, hardware department, or shoe department in the private sector.
• By the place where the workers do their work.
Gulick is careful to recognize that these modes of organization can often cross, forming a complex and interrelated organizational structure where organizations like schools will include workers and professionals not in the field of education such as doctors or nurses, janitors, secretaries, police departments might include non-police professionals, a shoe department including buyers as well as salespeople, etc.
Under Coordination, Gulick notes that two methods can be used to achieve coordination of divided labor. The first is by organization, or placing workers under managers who coordinate their efforts. The second is by dominance of an idea, where a clear idea of what needs to be done is developed in each worker, and each worker fits their work to the needs of the whole. Gulick notes that these two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and that most enterprises function best when both are utilized.
Gulick notes that any manager will have a finite amount of time and energy, and discusses span of control under coordination. Drawing heavily from military organizational theory and the work of V. A. Graicunas,Sir Ian Hamilton, and Henri Fayol, Gulick notes that the number of subordinates that can be handled under any single manager will depend on factors such as organizational stability, the specialization of the subordinates and whether their manager comes from the same field or specialty, and space. Gulick stops short of giving a definite number of subordinates that any one manager can control, but authors such as Sir Ian Hamilton and Lyndall Urwick have settled on numbers between three and six. Span of control was later expanded upon and defended in depth by Lyndall Urwick in his 1956 piece The Manager's Span of Control.
Also under coordination, as well as organization, Gulick emphasizes the theory of unity of command, that each worker should only have one direct superior so as to avoid confusion and inefficiency.
Still another theory borrowed from military organizational theory, particularly Sir Ian Hamilton and Lyndall Urwick and brought to prominence in non-military management and public administration by Gulick and Urwick is the distinction between operational components of an organization, the do-ers, and coordinating, the coordinating components of an organization who do the knowing, thinking, and planning. In the military, this is divided between "line" and "staff" functions. Gulick gives the private-sector example of a holding company performing limited coordinating, planning, and finance functions, with subsidiary companies carrying out their work with extensive autonomy as it saw fit according to the parent company's overall direction.
Fayol's influence upon Gulick is readily apparent in the five elements of management discussed in his book, which are:
• Planning - examining the future and drawing up plans of actions
• Organizing - building up the structure (labor and material) of the undertaking
• Command - maintaining activity among the personnel
• Co-ordination - unifying and harmonizing activities and efforts
• Control - seeing that everything occurs in conformity with policies and practices