BEFORE MANAGEMENT

"Before Management" challenges a foundational assumption of organizational life: that management is natural, necessary, and universal. Drawing on Indigenous governance systems across North America, this book argues that what we call management is a recent invention, a workaround developed by societies that lost older, more elegant systems for coordinating human activity. Indigenous peoples solved the fundamental problems of collective action through mechanisms that modern organizations have largely forgotten: authority that expired when context changed, consensus processes that treated dissent as data rather than obstacle, accountability systems that restored rather than punished, and economies oriented toward stewardship rather than extraction. This is not a how-to guide for adopting Indigenous practices; some knowledge is not portable, and the impulse to extract "lessons" reflects the very managerial mindset the book critiques. Instead, it is an invitation to see management differently, to question assumptions so deep they have become invisible, and to consider whether the future of organization might resemble patterns that predate management itself.