Chester Irving Barnard (1886–1961) was both a successful corporation executive and a powerful theorist about the nature of corporate organizations.
Born in Maiden, Massachusetts, Barnard rose from humble origins, beginning a life of hard work at the age of 12. He supported himself while attending Mount Hermon School and during his three years at Harvard College. Upon leaving Harvard at the age of 23, he took a job as a statistical clerk with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in Boston. He stayed with the Bell System for 39 years, from 1909 to 1948.
Barnard’s first 13 years with the company were spent working as an expert on the economics of telephone rates. By 1922, when he was 36, he began performing what he was later to call “executive services,” and by the age of 41 he had become the first president of New Jersey Bell Telephone. His 21 years as president were also the period of his most fruitful intellectual activity; both his books were written during those years. It may be remarkable that the Bell System tolerated such “deviant” behavior on the part of one of its chief executives, but Barnard surely separated his “personal decisions” from his “organizational decisions” (as he called them in The Functions of the Executive).
From 1931 to 1933, and again in 1935, Barnard served as state director of the New Jersey Relief Administration, an experience that allowed him to sample organization life outside of the Bell System. This experience inspired his only piece of formal research as a participant–observer: he recorded and analyzed his experiences in the form of a case for Lawrence J. Henderson’s course at Harvard on “concrete sociology.”