Edward Francis Leopold Brech

Brech was born in Kennington to a Hungarian father, who worked as catering manager, and a Bavarian mother.

[1] At the age of 85 Brech earned his doctorate in British management history through Britain's Open University, where he also was a visiting research fellow.

[2] Brech started working in 1929 at a fur trader, and became tutor at the German Commercial school in London.

It included a comprehensive number of profiles of leading proponents of management theory, from early pioneers such as Charles Babbage and Frederick Winslow Taylor, to those such as Seebohm Rowntree and Mary Parker Follett who innovated and refined their concepts.

A long background of scientific management practices had previously been largely unknown before publication of these volumes.

The Hawthorne Investigations," Elton Mayo (1947) acknowledged, that: Lyndall Urwick was the first person to take public notice of the successive studies of human relations in industry undertaken by the Western Electric Company.

He was at the time Director of the International Institute of Management at Geneva; and somewhere in the early 1930s he published a monograph on the Hawthorne experiments.

It is, I feel, timely and appropriate that one who first noticed the interest of the Hawthorne study should again undertake to make available to that section of the British public who desire to be further informed something of its details and probable significance.

I hope that the book will be read widely by the many who are, in these days of difficulty, vitally interested in the human problems of modern industry.