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In January of 1915, Harvard University Press first published a 119-page business book covered in modest maroon cloth. Its thirty-eight-year-old author, Arch Wilkinson Shaw, was a former office supply company owner and ardent student of "scientific" business management. Three years earlier, the Dean of the Harvard Faculty of Commerce had hired Shaw to help teach business policy, reorganize curriculum, and start the school's Bureau of Business Research. The result, Some Problems in Market Distribution, would prove the world's first supply chain management textbook.
"The most pressing problem of the business man today," Shaw wrote," is systematically to study distribution," by which he meant both physically supplying a product and creating demand for it among consumers via marketing." Demand creation was advertising and sales," says Bud La Londe, professor emeritus of logistics at Ohio State University/Physical supply was figuring out how to get it there."
In both cases, Shaw meant his book to end what he termed 'the era of rule-of-thumb' in favor of 'the laboratory point of view.' Separately...