Management

You want me to explain what management is? Well, I guess I can manage that! Actually, management as we understand it today is a fairly recent idea. Most economists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, wrote about factors of production such as land, labour, and capital, and about supply and demand, as if there were impersonal and objective economic forces which left no room for human action. An exception was Jean-Baptiste Say, who invented the term “entrepreneur”, the person who sees opportunities to use resources in more productive ways.

Entrepreneurs are people who are alert to so-far undiscovered profit opportunities. They perceive opportunities to commercialise new technologies and products that will serve the market better than it is currently being served by their competitors. They are happy to risk their own or other people’s capital. They are frequently unconventional, innovative people. But entrepreneurship isn’t the same as management, and most managers aren’t entrepreneurs.

So, what’s management? Well, it’s essentially a matter of organizing people. Managers, especially senior managers, have to set objectives for their organisation, and then work out how to achieve them. This is true of the managers of business enterprises, government departments, educational institutions, and sports teams, although for government services, universities and so on we usually talk about administrators and administration rather than managers and management. Managers analyse the activities of the organisation and the relations among them. They divide the work into distinct activities and then into individual jobs. They select people to manage these activities and perform the job. And they often need to make the people responsible for performing individual jobs form effective teams.

Managers have to be good at communication and motivation. They need to communicate the organisation’s objectives to the people responsible for attaining them. They have to motivate their staff to work well, to be productive, and to contribute something to the organisation. They make decisions about pay and promotion.

Managers also have to measure the performance of their staff, and to ensure that the objectives and performance targets set for the whole organisation and for individual employees are reached. Furthermore, they have to train and develop their staff, so that their performance continues to improve.

Some managers obviously perform these tasks better than others. Most achievements and failures in business are the achievements or failures of individual managers.

Translate the expressions in italics into your own language.

1.1. Management Styles

 Do men and women bring different qualities to business or is it nonsense to talk about male and female management styles?

Mark the following management qualities: M, W or M/ W according to whether you think are more typical of men, more typical of women or shared by both.

1. Being able to take the initiative.

2. Being a good listener.

3. Staying calm under pressure.

4. Being prepared to take risks.

5. Being conscientious and thorough.

6. Having good communication skills.

7. Being energetic and assertive.

8. Getting the best out of people.

9. Being independent and authoritative.

10. Being supportive towards colleagues.

11. Being able to delegate.

12. Motivating by example.

13. Having a co-operative approach.

14. Being single-minded and determined.

15. Being a good time-manager.

Then select what you consider to be the five most important qualities in any manager and put them in order of importance.

- Read the article below:

Business was invented by men and to a certain extent it is still ‘a boy’s game’. Less than 20% of the managers in most European companies are women, with fewer still in senior positions.

In Britain one in three new businesses are started up by women and according to John Naisbitt and Patricia Auberdene, authors of ‘Megatrends 2000’, since 1980 the number of self-employed women has increased twice as fast as the number of self-employed men.