Management

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  Welcome to management,  and its career development theme- “Get to know yourself better.” We life an work in very complex times. Financial turmoil, great resource and evironmental hallenges, uncertainties of international relations, the economics of globalization, and complexities of balancing work and personal lives are just some of the forces and trends that are having an undeniable impact or our society. The dynamics of ever career challenges. There is no better time than now to commit your energies and intellect to continuous learning and personal developmrnt. Indeed, your future depends on it.
  We are deadling with a new workplace, on in wich everyone must adapt to a rapidly changing society whith costantly shifting demands and opportunities, lerning and speed are in; habit and complacency are out, organizations are fast changing, as is the nature of work itself. The economy is global, driven by innovation and technology. Even the concept of succes, personal and organizational, is evolving  as careers  are transformed. Can there be any doubt that this a time when smart people and smart organizations create their own futures?

    In the quest for the future, the best employers share an important commitment-they value people! They are extremely good at attracting and retaining talented employers, and they excel at creating high-performancesetting in which talented  people achieve great results-individually. and collectively. In their book The new American workplace, james o’toole and Edward e. Lawyer, iii, call such employers “high involvement” organizations and describe them as creating challenging  and enriched jobs, allowing employee input in decisions, and avoiding layoffs and excessive turnover.

    What often sets reat organizations apart today is that they offer creative and inspiring leadership  and supportive work environments that reward and respect people, allowing their talents to be fully utilized. The themes of the day are “respect”, “participation,” “empowerment,” “involvememt,” “tem work,” and “self-management.” Allof this, and more, is what management 10/e and management course are about. They are designed to introduce you to the concepts, themes, and directions that are consistent with career success and organizational ledadership in the high-informance setting of today’s new workplace.

• WORKING TODAY

   Expectations for organization and their members are very high. Organizations are expected to continuously excel o performance criteria that include concerns for ethics and social responsibilities, innovativeness,  and employee development, as well as more traditional meansures of pofitability and investment value, when they fail, custumers, investors, and employees are quick to let them know. For individuals, there are no guarantees of long-term employment. Jobs are increasingly earned and re-earned every day through one’s performance accomplishments. Careers are being redefined in terms of “flexibility,” “free agency,” “skills portfolios,” and “enterpreneurship.” Career success takes lot of initiative and discipline, as wel as continuous learning.

• TALENT

If you follow the news you’ll find many examples of great organizations, and there should be many right in your local community. One that often makes the managementnews in Herman miller, an innovative manufacturer of designer furniture. Respect for employees is a rule of thumb at the firm, whose core values include this statement: “our greatest assets as a corporation are the gifts, talents and abilities of our employee-owners... when we as a corporation invest in developing people, we are investing  in our future. “ former CEO max depree says, “we talk about the difference between being successful and beingexceptional. Being successful is meeting goals in a good way-being exceptional is reaching your potential.”

 Herman Miller seems  to fit O’Toole and Lawler’s notion of a high-involvement organization. It also seems conistent whit result from a study of high-performing companies by management scholars  Charles O’Reilly and Jeffrey pfeffer. They concluded that high performers achieve success because they are better than their competitors at getting extraordinary result from the people working  for them. “these companies have won the war for talent,” they says: “not just by being great places to work-although they are that-but by figuring out how to get the best out of all of their people, every day.”

   The point of these examples is that people and their talents-what they know, what they learn, and wht they do whit it-are the ultimate foundations of organizational performance. They represent what managers call in tellectual capital, the collective brainpower or shared knowladge work force that can be used to create value. Indeed, the ultimate elegance of any organization is its ability to combine the talents of many people, sometimes thousands of them, to achieve unique and significant results.

Consider this intellectual capital equation as a ay of personalizing this discusion. If you want a successfull career, you must be a source of intellectual capital employers. You must be someone willing to reach for the heights of personal competency and acomplishment. This means being a self starter willing a continuously lern from experience. And its means becoming a valued knowladge worker someone whose mind is a critical aset to employers and adds to the intellectual capital of theorganizaion. The late management guru peter drucker once said: “knowladge workers have many options and should be treatedas volunteers. They’re interested in personal achievement and personal reponsibility. They expect continuous learning and training. They will respect and want authority. Give it to them.”

• DIVERSITY

The term workforce diversity describes the compesition of a workforce in terms of differences among people on gender, age, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual, orientation, and able-bodiedness. The diversity trends of changing demographics are well recognized:  more seniors, women, minorities, and immigrants are in the workforce. The U.S. census bureau predicts thast by 2042 whites will be inthe minority and the combned populatios african american, american indians, asians and hispanics will be the majority. Hispanics are now the largest minority group and the fastest growing. And while aging baby boomers a growing proportion of the population, more of them are postponing retirement.

Even though our society is diverse, diversity issues in employment are not always handled very well. How, for example, can we explain research in which resumes whith white sounding first names, such as breet, received 50% more responses from potential employers than those with black sounding first names, such as kareem? The fact that these resumes were created with equal credentials suggest diversity bias, wether unconscious or deliberate.

Prejudice , or the holding of negative,  irrational opinions and attitudes regarding members of diverse populations, sets the stage for diversity bias. It becomes active descrimination when minority members are unfairly treated and denied the full benefits of organzational membership. A subtle form of descrimination is called the glass ceiling effect, an invisible barrier or ”ceilling” that prevents women and  minorities from rising above a certain level of organizational responsibility. Sholar judith rosener warns that the loss caused by any form of discriminatory practicies is “undervalued and unerutilized human capital.”

• GLOBALIZATION

Japanese management consultant kenichi ohmae suggest tht the national bondaries of world bussines have largely disappeared. What is likelihood that you will someday work dosmetically for a foreign emplyer? When you call a customer service help line, do you know which country the servicec agent is speaking from? Can you state whith confidence where a pair of your favorite athletic shoes or the parts for your personal computer were manufactured? More and more products are designed in one country, whereas their components are sourced, and final assembly is contracted in other, and all are for sale in still others. We have reached the point wnere top managers at starbuks, ibm, sony. Toyota and other global corporations have little need for the word “overseas” in everyday bussines vocabulary. They operate as global bussines that are equidistant from customers and suppliers, wherever in the world they may be located.

   These are all part of the forces of globalization, the worldwide interdependence of resource flows, product markets, and bussines competition that characterizes our new economy. It is described as a process in which “improvements in technology (specially in communications and transportation) combine with the deregulation of markets and open borders to bring about vastly expanded flows people, moneys, goods, services, and information.

Globalization isn’t an abstract concept. It is increasingly a part of the fabric of our everday lives, and with particular consequences for work and careers. In our global world, countries and peoples are increasingly interconnected through the news, in travel and livestyles, in labor markets and employment patterns, and in financial and business dealings. Goverment leaders now worry about the competitiveness of nations, just as corporate leaders worry about business competitiveness. Employees in a growing number of occupations must worry about being replaced by workers in other countries who are willing and able to perform their jobs through outsourcing and at lower cost to employers. Even new college graduates must worry about lower-priced competition for the same job from graduates in other parts of the world.

• TECHNOLOGY

In many ways the forces of globalizationride on the foundations of the internet and the countinuing explosion communication technologies. For better or worse we live and wok in a technology-driven world increasingly dominated by barcodes, automatic tellers, e-mail, instant messaging, text messaging. Web blogs, online media,electronic commirce, social networks, and more. And for a glmpse what the future might hold, consider how many major firms are now participating in the virtual world of second life. If you long in and roam as an avatar, you can visit such major corporations as Toyota, IBM, and SONY to sample and learn about new products and services.

From second life to real life, from the small retail store the large multinational firm, technology is an indispensable part of everyday business-weather one is cheacking inventory, making a sales transaction, ordering suplies, or analyzing costumer preferences. Physical distance hardly matters anymore, in “virtual space,” people hold meetings, acces common databases, share information and files, make plans, and solve problems together-all without ever meeting face-to-face. The new technologies have also added great flexibelity to work arrangemets, allowing people to “telecommute,” “work from home,”  and maintain “mobile offices” while working in non-traditional ways and free from the constraints of the normal “8-5” schedules.

• ETHICS

When jeffrey skilling was sentenced to 24+ years in jail for crimes committed during the sensational collapse of Enron Corporation, the message was crystal clear. There is no excuse for senior executives in any orgnization to act illegally and to tolerate management system that enrich that few while damaging the many. The harm done at enron affected company employess who lost retirement savings and stockholders who lost investment values, as well as customers ad society at large who paid the price at the firm’s business performance deteriorated.

The issue raised here is ethics-a code of maral principles that sets standards of what is “good” and “right” as opposed to “bad” and “wrong” in the conduct of a person or group. And even thugh ethical failures like those at enron are well publicized and should be studied, there are a plethora of positive cases and ethical role models to be studied as well.

The former CEO of Dial Corporation, Herb Baum. Is one of the positive ethics examples. In his book The Transparent Leader. Baum argues that integrity is a key to leadership success and that the responsibility to set the ethical tone of an organization begins at the top. Believing that most CEOs are overpaid., he once gave his annual bonus to the firm’s lowest paid workers. Baum also tells the story of an ethical role model-a rival CEO. Reuben Mark, of colgate palmo live. Mark called him one day to say that a newly hired executive had brought wit him to colgate a disk containing dial’s new marketing compaign. Rather than read it, hi returned the disk to baum-an act baum called “the clearest case of leading with honor and transparency i’ve witnessed in my career.”

You will find in this book many people and organizations that are exemplars of ethical behavior and whose integrity is unquestioned. They meet the standardsof anew ethical reawakening and expectations for ethical leadership at all levels in an organization. They also show respect for such things as sustainable development and protection of the natural environment, protection of consumers through product safety and fair practices, and protection of human rights in all aspects of society, including employment.

• CAREERS

Globalization, emerging technologies, and the demand for talent make very personal the importance of initiative and self-renewal when it comes to careers. For most college students an immediate challenge is getting the first full-time job. And when the economy is down and employment markets are tight, the task of finding a career entry point can be daunting. It always pays to remember the importance of online resumes and job searches, and the power of social networking with established professionals. It’s also helpful to pursue “intership” as pathways to first job placements, an article in The Wall Street Journal, for example, reports that some 62% of college hires have held interships and thats many employers consider them prerequisites for job offers.

Today’s career challenge isn’t just finding your first job it’s also about successful career planning British scholar charles handy uses the analogy of the Irish shamrock to discuss career patterns characteristic of the new economy. In one leaf of Handy’s shamrock are the core workers. These full-time employees pursue traditional career paths. With success and the maintenance of critical skills, they can advance within the organizationand may remain employed for a long time. In the second leaf are contract workers. They perform specific task as needed by the organization and are compensated on a fee for-services basis rather than by a cotinuing wage or salary. They sell a skill or service and contract with many different employers over time. In the third leaf are part-time workers hired only as needed and for as long as needed. Employers expand and reduce their part-time staffs as business needs rise and fall.

• ORGANIZATIONS IN THE NEW WORKPLACE

In his article “This Company of the Future.” Robert Reich says: Everybody works for somebody or something-be it it a board of directors, a pension fund, a venture capitalist, or a traditional boss. Sooner or later you’re going to have to decide who you want to work for.” In order to make good employment choices and perform well in career, you need a fundamental understanding of the nature of organizations. Management smarts 1.1 provides a first look at some of the critical survival skills that you should acquire to work well in the organizations of today....and tomorrow.

1. WHAT IS AN ORGANIZATION? - An organization is a collection of people working together to achieve a common purpose. It is a unique social phenomenon that enables its members to perform tasks far beyond the reach of individual accomplishment. This description applies to organizations of all sizes and types, from large corporations to the small businesses that make up the life of any community, to nonprofit organizations such as schools, goverment agencies, and community hospitals
2. ORGANIZATIONS AS SISTEMS - Organizations are open system that interact with their environments in the continual proces of obtaining resource input and then transforming them into outputs in the form of finished goods and services for their customers. As shown in figure 1.1, the external environment is both the supplier of resources and the source of customers. Feedback from the environment indicates how well an organization is doing. When customers stop buying a firm’s products, it will be hard to stay in business for long unless something soon changes for the better. Anytime you hear or read about bankruptcies, for example, remember that they are stark testimonies to this fact of the marketplace: without loyal customers, a business can’t survive.
3. ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE - If an organization is to perform well, its resources must be utilized and its customers must be well served. This is a processof value creation through organizational performance. If operations add value to the original cost of resource inputs, then (1) a business organization can earn a profit –that is sell a product for more than the cost of making it-or (2) a nonprofit organization can add wealth to society-that is, provide a public service that is worth more than its cost (e.g., fire protection in a community).
4. CHANGING NATURE OF ORGANIZATONS - Change is continuing theme in society, and organizations are certainly undergoing dramatic changes today. Although not exhaustive, the following list of organizational trends and transitions is relevant to your study of management.

§  Renewed belief in human capital: demans of the new economy place premiums on high-involvement and participatory work settings that rally the knowladge, experience, and commitment of all members.

§  Demise of “command and control”: traditional hierarschical structures with “do as i say” bosses are proving too slow, conservative, and costly to do well in today’s competitive environments.

§  Emphasis an teamwork: today’s organizations are less vertical and more horizontal in focus, they are increasingly driven by teamwork that pools talents for creative problem solving.

•       MANAGER IN THE NEW WORKPLACE

   This chapter opened with an emphasis on people, along with their talents in intellectual capital, as key foundations of organizational succes. In an article entitled “puting people first for organizational success, “jeffrey pfeffer and john f. Veiga argue forcefully that organizations perform better when they treat their  member better. They note that “managers” in high-performing organizations act in ways that truly value people. They don’t treat people as costs to be controlled; they treat them as valuable strategic assets to be carefully nurtured and developed. So, who are these “managers” and just what do they do.

1. WHAT IS MANAGER? - You find them in all organizations. They work with a wide variety of job titles-team leader, departemen head, supervisor, project manager, dean, president, administrator, and more. They always work directly with other persons who rely on them for critical support and assistance in their own jobs. Peter drucker described their job as “to make work productive and workers effective . we call them managers, people in organizations who directly support, supervise, and help activate the work efforts and performance accomplishment of others.
2. LEVELS OF MANAGERS - At the highest levels of organizations, as shown in figure 1.3, common job titles are chief excutive  officer (CEO), president, and vice president. These top managers are responsible for the performance of an organization as a whole or for one of its larger parts. They are supposed to pay special attention to the external environment, be alert potential long-run problems and opportunities, and develop appropriate ways of dealing with them. Top managers also create and communicate long-term vision, and ensure that strategies and objectives are consistent with the organization’s purpose and mission
3. TYPES OF MANAGERS - In addition to serving at different levels of authority, managers work in different capacities with organizations. Line managers are responsible for work that makes a direct contribution to the organization’s outputs. For example, the president, retail manager, and departement supervisors of a local departement store all have line responsibilities. Their jobs in one way or another are directly related to the sales operations of the store. Staff managers, by contract, use special technical expertise to advise and support the efforts of line workers. In a departement store, again, a director of human resources and chief financial officer would have staff responsibilities.
4. MANAGERIAL PERFORMANCE - All managers help people, working individually and in groups, to perform. They do this while being held personally “accountable” for result achieved. Accountability is a requiremant of one person to answer to a higher authority for performance results in his on her area of work responsibility. The team leader is accountable to middle manager, the middle manager is accountable to a top manager, and even the top manager  is accountable to a board of directors or board of trustees.
5. CHANGING NATURE OF MANAGERIAL WORK - Cindy zollinger is president of cornerstone research and directly supervises some 24 people. But she says: “i don’t really manage them in typical way: they largely run themselves. I help them in dealing with obstacles they face, or in making the most of opportunities they find. As cindy’s comment suggest, we are in a time when the best managers are know more for “helping” and “supporting” than for “directing” and “order giving” the words ‘coordinator,” “coach,” and “team leader” are heard as often as “supervisor” or “boss.” The best managers are will informed regarding the needs of those reporting or dependent on them. They can often be found providing advice and developing the support needed for other to perform to the best of their abilities.

• FUNCTIONS OF MANAGEMENT

The process of management involves planning organizing leading and controlling the use of resources to accomplish performance goals. These four management functions and their interrelationships are shown in figure 1.5. all managers, regardless of title, level, type, and organizational setting, are responsible for the four function. However, they are not accomplished in a linear, step-by-step fashion. The reality is that these functions are continuallyengaged as a manager moves from task to task and opportunity to opportunity in his or her work.

1. Planning - In management, planning is the proces of setting performance objectives and determining what actions should be taken to accomplish them. Through planning a manager identifies desired results and ways to achieve them. Take for example, an errist & young initiative that was developed to better meet the needs of the firm’s female professionals. This initiative grew out of top management’s concern about the firm’s retention rates for women. The firm’s chairman at the time. Philip a. Laskawy, launched a diversity task force with the planning objective to reduce turnover rates for women. When the task force began its work, this turnover  was running some 22% per year, and it cost the firm about 150% of a departing employee’s annual salary to hire and train each replacement.
2. Organizaing - Even the best plans will fail without strong implementation. This begins with organizing: the proces of assigning task, allocating resources, and coordinating the activies of individuals and group to implenents plans. Through organizing managers turn plans into actions by defining jobs, assigning personnel, and supporting them with technology and other resources.
3. Leading - In managenent, leaing is the process of arousing people’s enthusiasm to work hard and inspiring their eforts to fulfill plans and accomplish objectives. By leading, managers build commitments to a common vision encourage activies that support goals, and influence  others to do their best work on organization’s behalf.
4. Controlling - The management function of controlling is the process of measuring work performance, comparing results to objectives, and taking corrective action as needed. Through controlling, managers mintain active contact with people in the course of their work, gather and interpret reports on performance, and use this information to make constructive changes. In today’s dynamic times, such control and adjustment are indispensible. Things don’t always go as  anticipated, and plans must be modified and redefined for future success.

• MANAGERIAL ROLES AND ACTIVITIES

1. Managerial roles - In trying to better understand and describe the nature of managerial work, Mintzberg also identified a set of 10 roles that mangers fulfill. The roles fall into three categories: informational, interpersonal, and decisional roles. A manager’s informational roles involve the giving , receiving, and analyzing information. A manager fulfilling these roles will be a monitor, scanning for inforation; a disseminator, sharing information; and a spokesperson, acting as official communicator. The interpersonal roles involve interactions with people inside and outside the work unit. A manager fulfilling these rles will be a figurehead, modeling and setting forth key principles and policies; a leader, providing direction and instilling enthusiasm; and aliaison, coordinating with others. The decisional roles involve using inforation to make decisions to solve problems or address opportunities. A manager fulfilling these roles will be a disrubance handler, dealing with problems and conflict; a resource allocator, handling budgets and distributing resources; a negotiator-making deals and forging agreements; and an entepreneur-developing  new initiatives.
2. Managerial activities - Managers must not only understand and master their roles; they must also have the ability yo implement them in an intense and complex work setting. The managers mintzberg observed had little free time to themselves; unexpected problems andcontinuing requests for meetings consumed almost all the time that became available. Their workdays were hectic, and the pressure for the continuously improving performancewas all-encompassing. Mintzberg summarized his observations this way: “ the manager can never be free to forget the job, and never has the pleasure of knowing, even temporarily, that there is nothing else to do.... managers always carry the nagging suspicion that they might be able to contribute just a little bit more. Hence they assumean unrelenting pace in their work.

Without any doubt, managerial work is busy, demandind, and stressful for all levels of responsibility in any work setting. A summary of continuing research on the nature of managerial work offers this important reminder.

§  Mangers work long hours.

§  Managers work at an intense pace.

§  Managers work at fragmented and varied tasks.

§  Managers work with many communication media

§  Managers accomplish their work largely through interpersonal relationships.

LEARNING HOW TO MANAGE

Today’s turbulent times present an ever shifting array of problems, opportunities, and performance expectations for organizations, their managers, and their members . all of this, of course, means that your career success depends on a real commitment to learning-changing behavior through experience. In management the learning focus is on developing skills and competencies to deal with the complexities of human behavior and problem solving in organizations. When you think about this goal, don’t forget that it’s no just formal learning in the classroom that counts. Indeed the long-term difference in career succes may well rest with lifelong learning the process of continuous learning from all of our daily experiences and opportunities.

ESSENTIAL MANAGERIAL SKILLS

A skill is the ability to translate knowledge into action that results in desired performance. Harvard scholar robert l. Katz has classified the essential, or baseline, skills of managers into three useful categories: technical, human, and coceptual. He suggests that their relative importance tends to vary by level of managerial responsibility.

Technical skills

A technical skill is the ability to use a special proficiency or expertise to perform particular tasks. Accountants, engineers, market researchers, financial planners, and system analysts, for example, posses technical skills. These skills are initially acquired through formal education and are further developed by trainning and job experience.

Human and interpersonal skill

The ability to work well in coorperation with other persons is a human skill or an interpersonal skill. Given the highly interpersonal nature of managerial work, human skills are consistenly important across all the managerial levels. They emerge in the workplace is as the capacity to collaborate and network with others, to engage others with a spirit of trust, enthusiasm, and positive engagement. The next time you sign on to facebook or bebo or linkedln, for example, think about how these social networking experiences can translate into workplace networking skills.

Conceptual and analytical skills

The  ability to think critically and analytically is a conceptual skill. It involves the capacity to break problems into smaller parts, to see the relations between theparts, and to recognize the implications of any one problem for others. In the classroom we often call this “critical thinking.” It is a diagnostic skill that facilitates effective decision making and problem solving. As people assume ever-higher responsibilities in organizations, they are called upon to deal with more ambiguous problems that have many complications ad longer-term consequences.