Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas

Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas (August 17, 1898 in Chicago – January 9, 1952 in Olzheras, Siberia) was a Lithuanian management theorist, management consultant, and engineer. Born to Lithuanian immigrants, he studied at the University of Chicago. During World War I served in France. After coming back in 1919, he became interested in management and continued his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 1927 he came to Lithuania and worked at Kaunas factories. Soon he started traveling and working across Europe. Until 1935 he worked as a consultant and helped to establish large companies in Barcelona, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, and Milan. During this period he published his classical study printed in Geneva Relationship in Organization in 1933. Soon other editions appeared in the United States. He mathematically proved that a manager should not have more than 4-5 subordinates. He came up with the following formula to express the total number of relationships between a boss and his or her subordinates:

N [(2N/2) + N - 1], where N is a number of subordinates.

When number of subordinates increases, the number of relationships increases exponentially; at 5 subordinates the number of relationships is 100, at 10 - 5,210. Many scientists expanded or criticized the theory, among them was Herbert A. Simon.

In 1935 Graičiūnas returned to Lithuania, where he worked as an engineer, management consultant at various state and private institutions, including Ministry of Defense, Lithuanian aviation, Lithuanian State Theatre, Lithuanian Film Company. He also lectured at the Vytautas Magnus University and was awarded Commander's Cross of Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. During World War II Graičiūnas decided to remain in Lithuania despite clear threats of the occupation by the Soviet Union.

In 1951 while visiting Moscow with a group of students he visited the embassy of the United States where he was told that only he could leave the Soviet Union because his wife, actor Unė Babickaitė, did not have U.S. citizenship. After this incident Graičiūnas and his wife were arrested for espionage and anti-soviet activities, tried and sentenced to several years in gulag. He died the following year under unclear circumstances. His wife, after Joseph Stalin's death in 1953, got her sentence reduced and returned to Kaunas.

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