Oliver Sheldon

Oliver Sheldon
Born	13 July 1894
Died	7 August 1951
Occupation	CEO of Rowntree Company

Oliver Sheldon (1894–1951) was a director of the Rowntree Company in York, in the UK. He wrote on principles of public and business administration in the 1920s.

Oliver Sheldon was born on 13 July 1894. He was educated at King's College School and Merton College, Oxford. In World War I he served as an officer in the Royal Engineers, and was mentioned in despatches. He joined the Rowntree Company in 1919 as Personal Assistant to Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, and in 1931 was appointed to the general Board of Directors at Rowntree. At Rowntree's, Sheldon was a colleague of Lyndall Urwick and, like Urwick, was an active member of the Taylor Society.

Sheldon was closely involved in restructuring the management and organization of the growing confectionery company at a stage where its growth meant by necessity it had to move away from the personal, family-centered management of its founder, Joseph Rowntree, towards a more professional culture. Under the chairmanship of Joseph's son, Seebohm, the company adopted Sheldon's proposals for a more functional style of organisation, but he tempered this with a belief, shared by the Rowntree firm's senior managers, that industry existed for more than the profit of shareholders. Sheldon held that good management was about more than technique - it should be concerned with human understanding. "The leadership of men calls for patience, courage, and, above all, sympathy." Service to the community was the primary motive and fundamental basis of industry.

Consequently, Sheldon advocated a human relations style of management which placed the individual in a human context involving a range of emotional and psychological needs. In this, he disagreed fundamentally with contemporaries such as F.W. Taylor, who saw economic need as being the primary motivator of workers. Anticipating later writers such as Elton Mayo and Frederick Herzberg by some years, Sheldon argued that, while basic economic needs must be met, wider personal and community needs were equally important.

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