There’s a host of well-known minds in the realm of business management: Michael Hammer, Thomas Davenport, James Short, Peter Drucker, Tom Peters and Henry Ford.
But, Adam Smith. Have you heard of him?
In 1776, Adam Smith – perhaps the Great Grandfather of business analysis – published the first example of a business process in the production of a pin.
Smith showed that by identifying the steps in a process, you could use division of labour to assign specialists for each step and hence improve the quality of the product and the speed of its production.
(P.S. look, no Visio.)