Business Textbooks Boundless Business Management An Introduction to Management
Business Textbooks Boundless Business Management
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Concept Version 14
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The Need for Management

Management is needed in order to facilitate a coordinated effort toward the accomplishment of an organization's goals.

Learning Objective

  • Explain the purpose of management

Key Points

    • Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively.
    • Good managers are needed to keep their organizations on track by ensuring that everything that's being done is ethically geared toward providing what customers want.
    • Good management is needed to inject motivation, creativity, discipline, and enthusiasm into areas in which they either don't exist or they're not necessarily wanted.
    • People who work for managers must realize that it is their job to make their managers value them.

Term

  • entrepreneurship

    The art or science of innovation and risk-taking for profit in business.

Example

    • IBM is still in business today due to the management skills of Louis V. Gerstner, Jr. When he arrived at IBM in April 1993, an active plan was in place to dis-aggregate the company. The prevailing wisdom of the time held that IBM's core mainframe business was headed for obsolescence. The company's own management was in the process of allowing its various divisions to rebrand and manage themselves — the so-called "Baby Blues. " Gerstner reversed this plan, realizing from his previous experiences at RJR and American Express that there remained a vital need for a broad-based information technology integrator. His decision to keep the company together was the defining decision of his tenure, as this gave IBM the capabilities to deliver complete IT solutions to customers. Services could be sold as an add-on to companies that had already bought IBM computers, while barely profitable pieces of hardware were used to open the door to more profitable deals.

Full Text

The Purpose of Management

The purpose of management is to serve customers. Yet, if one looks through most management books for a definition of management, 99.9 percent of the time the word customer will not be mentioned. This is astonishing because serving customers in order to obtain a profit is the crux of every business organization. Equally remiss is the fact that most definitions of management neatly filter out service in their descriptions of management.

Good managers constantly streamline their organizations toward making a sale. In other words, good managers are needed to keep their organizations on track by ensuring that everything that's being done is ethically geared toward providing what customers want . In this regard, a good manager is responsible for reducing waste and ambiguity, keeping costs down, and motivating others to do the same. In the same vein, good managers regularly take educated risks and exercise good judgement (the basis of entrepreneurship). These risks include:

The Need for Management

Management is needed in order to coordinate the activities of a business and make sure all employees are working together toward the accomplishment of the organization's goals.

  • Trying new things;
  • Successfully adjusting to constant change;
  • Developing subordinates (good managers aren't afraid of letting other people shine and, in fact, they encourage it);
  • Improving their own skills.

The Need for Management

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Since organizations can be viewed as systems, management can also be defined as human action (including design) to facilitate the production of useful outcomes from a system. Therefore, management is needed in order to facilitate a coordinated effort toward the accomplishment of the organization's goals.

Since most managers are responsible for more work than one person can normally perform, a good manager delegates and integrates his or her work (or the work of others). A manager does this by acting as a clear channel of communication within the business that he or she serves. Good management is needed to inject motivation, creativity, discipline, and enthusiasm into areas in which they either don't exist or they're not necessarily wanted.

The various functions of management are classified as:

Management is also responsible for the formation and implementation of business policies and strategies.

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