Management – anglicky

Management

 

Effective management purposfully influences and regulates processes to make them more efficient in a right direction. Management is viewed as a specific activit steering firms towards achieving their basic goals:

• maximization of profit
• long-term stability
• other objectives defined in the firm’s founding documents

 

The knowledge of essential features of market economy is indispensable, particularly those dealing with competition, suplly and demands as well as the behaviour of consumers and organizations.

 

1. History of management

The first analyses were made at the start of the 20th century and were focused on production processe. Later, they included administration and also social and psychological factors. Since the 70s, the theory started to reflect the participation of employees in the management of enterprises and studied the resulting relationships. Remarkable achievements of some personalities on the enterpreneurial scene also gave new impulses to some authors not only to write interesting biographies, but to try to devise new formulas of success based on the life stories of corporate megastars.

 

2. Functions of managements

Basic principles of management were formulated by H. Fayol who recognized 4 basic functions or stages, closely folloving each other in a recurring cycle:

• Planning – defines the firms’s goals and helps to work out plans for their realization
• Organizing – assigns every employee to a specific job and establishes relations between individuals and groups for carrying out the required activities in a co-ordinated manner
• Decision-making and leading, when information is passed on the people in the form of motivations and directives, instructing employees to fulfil their tasks with maximum efficiency
• Controlling, which compares plans and realities and realities and identifies the cause of deviations

 

Management envisages the feedback of all the firms’s substatial operations and by the same token each operation is to be properly managed.

 

3. Management tasks

If we understand management as a group of top executives who steer a firm, the following tasks of a top executive appear the most important:

• Definition of goal
• Their inclusion in the plan
• Solving of critical situations

 

4. Organization ad strategy

In its analytic as well as integrating role, management uses specific working methods for finding solutions to problems which the firm has to cope with. In the course of time, 2 important areas have drawn special attention of experts: organization and strategy.

 

5. Methods of management

A large part of manaement research is based on the fact that management preppposes working with people. There is a variety of means which a management can use to achieve his/her goals. There is his/her formal uperiority in the company structure and, besides directvices and instrukction, a whole set of incentives as well as anctions at his/her disposal to accomplish his/her objectives as (s)he sees best. There is his/her character and personality too. Knowledge, experience, abilities, intuition are frequently mentioned among the most desirable qualities.

Some of the methods that have been explored and tested with various degrees of success can be briefly characterized as fallows:

• Competence building
• Enterpreneurism: some big comapanies are know to have been decentralized into smaller units in order to inspire innovative thinking personal achievement.
• Support of creativity in all its forms lays greater emphasis on knowledge as th emost valuable resource of a company and at the same time brings greater self-fulfilment to workers. Modernideas and practices of reengineering and restructuring are based on the same concept of viewing things which have long been taken for granted and verified, in a new and different light. All these methods try to generate the best combinations of logic and intuition, use free association and enhance unconventionla thinking. The corresponding techniques are brainstorming and the 635.

 

6. Style of management

The style of management, manifested in the manager’s approach to his/her subordinates, can be:

• Autocratic: despotic, authoritative
• Democratic: consultative, participative
• Liberal

 

In relation to the firms’s environment, the style can be:

• Realistic: pragmatic, focused on immediate results
• Idelalistic: theoretical, systematic
• Opportunistic: including both elements
• Concliatory: seeking balance between the various firm’s groups

 

7. Management techniques

Once the goal are defined, it is necessary to decide which technique of management should be used.

• Management by objective, often abbreviated to MBO, seeks maximum efficinecy of alllcated means throught continuous discussions og goals between the superioty and subordinates in every departments
• Participative management by objectives strives for a compromise between the goals and a suitable form of participation of the employees in the formulation and realization of the goals
• Management by deviations means that the manager takes action only when significant indicators are signalling a problem

 

8. Control

The control should be understood as

• A continuing process monitoring the results specified in annual operative plans
• Adoption fo corrective measures, if necessary
• A control systém ensuring the continuity of process

 

The control of an organizations and its perdormance can be effected by an internal control systém or an indepenedt audit. The control can be effective if it is purposeful, well-timed and performed in an acceptable manner.

 

9. Forms of control

Since the control is an integral part of the whole managements process amd should be applied to all company’s operations, there is a corresponding variety of ways and the forms in which it can be exercised. The following list includes some of the most frequently types: current. Feedforward, internal, output, paper, period, quality, random, routine, selective, stock.

 

10. Corporate culture

This term is o be undersood as an aggregate of values, customs and attitudes characterizing the climate the exists inside the firm and expressing its specific features. The components of corporate culture can be:

• Various rituals, myths and symbols
• Inter-company relations
• The way of thiking and reactin to problems, sometimes dubbed as „ideology“