Management Did Not Originally Mean Making Money

I teach both leadership and management. One of the most effective ways I have found to deepen my students’ understanding of management is to begin with the origin of the Japanese word 経営 – keiei. Once they encounter that older meaning, management stops looking like a narrow matter of targets, incentives, and profit—and starts to look like something larger: the work of clarifying purpose, designing action, and making willing cooperation possible. When I ask students what management means, they tend to answer in familiar corporate terms: targets, execution, incentives, reporting lines, and financial results. These answers are understandable.
But they are too narrow. What changes the discussion is introducing the older roots of the Japanese word keiei.
Once students encounter that background, management no longer looks like a merely technical function. It begins to appear in a fuller sense: the practice of clarifying purpose, designing action, and making voluntary cooperation possible. That is not just an interesting linguistic detail. It is a corrective. In the Book of Songs (Shijing), in a passage associated with King Wen of Zhou, we find a striking picture of the older meaning behind keiei: a ruler explains why a public project matters, shows how it will be done, and only then do the people gather to help. Only after that do the people gather to help. They do not come because they are forced. They come because the work has been made intelligible to them. The sequence is simple: first, purpose;
then, design;
then, mobilization. That is already a theory of management. Modern organizations often reverse the order.
They begin with execution pressure and only later, if at all, try to add meaning.
But people do not commit deeply to what they do not understand. They may comply. They may perform. They may even hit their targets. But they do not truly join. That is why this older meaning matters. It reveals something many organizations have forgotten. Management is not simply the administration of resources in pursuit of results. It is the work of making collective action possible. This is also why the idea has been so useful in the classroom.
Most students arrive with a narrowed mental model already installed. They expect frameworks, decision trees, and execution logic. None of that is wrong. But if management education stops there, it quietly teaches a thin view of organizations—one that treats institutions as machines and people as variables. The deeper managerial challenge is different. It is how to create a setting in which human beings can understand, commit, and act together. That requires more than control.
It requires more than incentives.
And it certainly requires more than profit. It requires purpose.
It requires design.
And it requires a form of legitimacy that makes cooperation willing rather than merely obedient. Money still matters, of course.
No serious view of management can ignore financial discipline. But money is a condition of organizational survival, not a complete account of what an organization is for. To confuse necessity with essence is one of the characteristic mistakes of modern management thinking. That is why I keep returning to keiei in class. The older roots of the word remind students that management did not originally mean making money. It meant something larger and harder: explaining why something should be done, showing how it could be done, and creating the conditions in which people would join of their own accord. Any organization can demand effort. Far fewer know how to deserve it.

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First published on Substack on Jun 10, 2026. Archived here as part of the Fabio Caipirinha permanent archive. Original: https://fabiocaipirinha.substack.com/p/management-did-not-originally-mean