1.3.. Answer the following questions:

1. Why can any organization expect a limited life without innovation?

2. Why is it necessary to manage business relations outside the company?

3. Who are the top managers appointed, supervised and advised by?

4. Is management entirely scientific?

5. What has to be learnt by managers?

6. Why do they say that the days of the “intuitive” manager are numbered?

7. Why are outstanding managers rather rare?

1.4. Try to remember 5 main duties of managers.

Text ¹ 2

For the next few lectures I am going to talk to you about management. I am sure none of you will want to remain in junior positions for very long after you have joined a company. You will obviously want to reach the top of the tree – or as near to it as you can get – not only because of the financial rewards – better pay – but also because of the mythical quality that no one can define but everyone knows is there – job satisfaction. So either by starting your own concerns or by working your way up the ladder, you will all want to wind up, at one level or another, as managers.

You will all want to become involved in management. But what do you think this term ‘management’ actually means? Perhaps you think the answer is obvious, but I suspect that if you discussed it with each other, you would quickly find some pretty wide differences of opinion. So what I’m going to do first is to offer you a definition and then look at the whole question of management from three different points of view.

Management is creative activity which develops an organisation and people to achieve specific goals.. A very neat definition. Just what we all meant to say. But what, in fact, does it mean? I’ll say it again. ‘Management is creative activity which develops an organisation and people to achieve specific goals.’ So all we need now is to decide what is meant by “creative activity”. Or how do you “develop an organisation”? Or its people? What is meant by specific goals? And so on. If you look at such a definition very closely, it doesn’t really help very much. We should try to be a bit more specific.

To be more precise, we ought to begin by realising that management styles in any organisation will vary according to the personality and the temperament of the individual manager. They will be influenced by the sort of person he is, and by what his beliefs are.

Nowadays we like to look at management from the scientific aspect, the behavioural aspect, and the systems management aspect. So we’ll now have a look to see what these mean. We should remember, of course, that for a complete picture we need a combination of all three, probably plus a few others as well. The concept of scientific management has been around rather longer than the others. It involves three main components – analysis, measurement, and method. All these three are essential if we are to get hold of the sort of knowledge that we need if we are going to make correct decisions.

But scientific knowledge is in practice limited to what can be measured or quantified – to things we can measure, weight, count and so on. This kind of knowledge is very important indeed, but it is only one small part of the whole. There is no doubt that most businesses would benefit from a more scientific management, but that is not enough on its own.

Actually, some people argue that science and the uses of sciences – which we now call technology – are not always beneficial anyway. It is not difficult to think of applications of science that are really awful, such as the weapons men use to kill and wound each other in war. It is in the use to which science is put that the manager’s beliefs – which I mentioned earlier – become important, but it is very difficult to measure beliefs!

So we need something more, and next time we shall look at the second aspect of management I mentioned – the behavioural.