Abstract Among modern scholars and students there is an increasing distance between the fundamental thoughts of early management writers and contemporary, often secondary, accounts of how these pioneers developed their ideas. This shortcoming can be remedied by seeking original sources from when a pioneer's ideas were being formulated and from the context within which this occurred. This article examines examples of how others have furthered the understanding of management history by the discovery and translation of pioneering writings and presents a rare, out-of-print translation and a previously untranslated and unpublished presentation from the French pioneer, Henri Fayol. These presentations to his colleagues in the mineral industry reveal Fayol's early reflections as they would later evolve into his classical book, Administration Industrielle et Generale. Among modern scholars and students there is an increasing distance between the fundamental thoughts of early management writers and contemporary, often secondary, accounts of how these pioneers developed their ideas. This shortcoming can be remedied by seeking original sources from when a pioneer's ideas were being formulated and from the context within which this occurred. We examine examples of how others have furthered our understanding of management history by the discovery and translation of pioneering writings and present a rare, out-of-print translation and a previously untranslated and unpublished presentation from the French pioneer, Henri Fayol. These presentations to his colleagues in the mineral industry reveal Fayol's early reflections as they would later evolve into his classical book, Administration Industrielle et Generale. As management historians, we are seldom able to trace the formative thinking of our field's major contributors, especially its founders. McMahon and Carr (1999, p. 228) noted the "increasing distance between students and scholars of today and the early writers in the development of management thought ... The current generation of students are reading less of the actual writings of the early scholars and more what those writing current texts are attributing to [them]." At best, by examining contemporary accounts, or in the limited instances where autobiographies exist, we can attempt to discern the incipient antecedents and inchoate reasoning giving rise to the later development of more polished thoughts (Bedeian, 1992; Carson and Carson, 1998). In this way, we may strive to gain a more complete understanding of our own intellectual heritage as it has been shaped by the experiences, reflections, and study of those who have gone before us, as well as continue to learn from the past as it informs the present (Bedeian, 1998). There are precedents that indicate how the discovery, translation, and/or reprinting of early writings have informed the present. We would still be in the dark about what really happened at the Hawthorne Plant of Western Electric without the seminal works of Wrege (1961) and Greenwood et al. (1983). Max Weber's (1922) turgid Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft was published posthumously and did not reach an English-reading audience until Gerth and Wright Mills' translation of Weber's theory of bureaucracy (Weber, 1946) and later, Henderson and Parsons' rendering of his theory of economics and society (Weber, 1947). Eberly and Smith's (1970) discovery of a heretofore unpublished speech by Mary Parker Follett enabled us to appreciate her concern with educational as well as business and public administration (Follett, 1970). Wrege's (1995) publication of a stenographer's notes of one of Frederick W. Taylor's "Boxly talks" provided material that Taylor presented to his audiences, as well as an early mention of Henry Noll, who became the famous "Schmidt" of the pig-iron handling studies. A 1998 reprint in the International Journal of Public Administration of Papers on the Science of Administration, edited by Gulick and Urwick (1937), enabled scholars to have access to a long out-of-print collection of papers by Luther Gulick, Lyndall Urwick, James D. Mooney, Henri Fayol, Henry S. Dennison, L. J. Henderson, T. N. Whitehead, Elton Mayo, Mary P. Follett, John Lee, and V. A. Graicunas. In each of these instances, modern readers can be informed about the past through the availability of foundational documents. In the case of Henri Fayol, English-reading audiences did not have wide access to his ideas until over three decades after the initial publication of his major work "Administration industrielle et generale" (Fayol, 1916). Charles de Freminville (1927) provided a synopsis of Fayol's administrative theory and comparison of Taylor and Fayol's thinking for a Taylor Society audience, but it apparently had little contemporary impact. The first translation of Fayol's Administration Industrielle et Generale (AIG) was by John Adair Coubrough "of the British Xylonite Co. Ltd ... The book was printed in Intern