History of Business

While business management consulting itself has only formally existed in more recent years, business has a long and proud history, heavily rooted on the ancient streets of Rome. In Rome, many ideas were pioneered that we see today in modern business. They spread coinage across the known world. They had government-sponsored roads to encourage trade, and even had a system of subsidies under the Republic to help encourage shipping trade. They had massive plantations, the fore-runner of our mass agriculture of today. According to the Ancient History Encyclopedia, "Whatever the exact economic mechanisms and proportion of state to private enterprise, the scale of trade in the Roman world is hugely impressive and no other pre-industrial society came even close." Rome laid the foundation for modern business.


Trajan Market in Rome

Management consulting started more recently, with Arthur D. Little of MIT being credited as the first management consultant. His firm still stands today, and helped launch a revolution. Business consultants started out mostly as efficiency experts, helping companies "lean down" their systems by cutting off waste processes, but eventually came into every branch of business imaginable.


Today, business is going through a revolution. According to entrepreneur Doug Marks, Big Data is changing the landscape of the marketing world. With so much data about customers available, through internet searches, website choices, and social media, companies, and especially consultants, have a veritable mountain of potentially valuable information. Marks says that, "Businesses spend a lot of money and effort on finding out who their customers are." What customers' preferences are, where they live, how they behave, it is all woven together in our modern world of Big Data, which is changing how we do and think about business at a blinding speed.
From the streets of Rome to the turn of the 20th century management consulting to the Big Data of today, business has been intertwined with how people have lived, and it will continue to do so in the years ahead.