Lyndall Urwick (1891-1983) was a British army officer turned theorist and consultant whose work integrated the ideas of scientific management with the ideas of classical organization theory. Luther Gulick (1892-1970) served on President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Committee on Administrative Management during the 1930s, and his major interests were political science and public service.

Urwick and Gulick edited a 1937 publication titled Papers on the Science of Administration, which included articles on organization theory and public administration. Gulick isolated the responsibilities of the chief executive and enumerated them according to the acronym POSDCORB, which stands for planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting. One of his main points was that well-managed, self-contained organizations or departments are nearly always headed by a single top manager such as a CEO. For his part, Urwick believed that the activities necessary to achieve organizational goals should be grouped and assigned to individuals in an impersonal way, echoing the impartial detachment of Max Weber's bureaucracy.

Urwick also wrote about the problems of managing large numbers of employees, identified multiple levels of supervisory management, and used a formula to determine the minimum and maximum number of subordinates a manager can effectively supervise. His work was an important step in synthesizing the principles of scientific management with the thinking of Weber and Fayol.