| MANAGING STRATEGIC CHANGE: AN EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW OF MANAGEMENT (ROBERT M. MURPHY) | ||||||||
PREFACE The term management is one of those words that may be losing its value in today's world. This is due to the fact that its usage is so broad and diverse that its meaning needs to be qualified in order for people in organizations to have a workable operational definition of the term. Review of the current textbooks on the subject of management also reveals a wide divergence when it comes to defining the term itself. It may be a little unfair to leave the impression that they are in total disagreement, but suffice to say that there is enough looseness in the various definitions to warrant some credence that this looseness is detracting from the real value of the concept. This argument is not merely a mind game in semantics. Fields of study certainly evolve over time, but the main tenets of most disciplines are normally pretty well fixed. Some may argue that this is the case in management; however, the experience of the author in the classroom with graduate and executive students as well as his almost 40 years in the work force leads him to believe that this is not so. Although many people take courses in management, once they get into the work force the concepts learned in management are deemed no longer applicable and thus soonforgotten. The purpose of this text is twofold. First, it is designed to help those individuals who have never taken a formal course in management. Although executives reading this text will probably have practical experiences in the field of management, they may be lacking in the conceptual foundation that would give them a deeper understanding of the concepts that frame those experiences. Before one can fully appreciate management at the strategic level, it is first necessary to understand the general concept of management in its most robust form. The second reason for the text is to help those individuals who have taken a course or two in management, but for whom time has eroded some of their knowledge of the field management. In conversations with managers and leaders in the workplace and in the classroom, many relate that through the years their experiences have been good and have left them with good feelings as to the nature of what is entailed in the process of management. Others who have had some bad experiences have neutral feelings or the view that management is a necessary evil. The reality is tha t management lies somewhere in between. INTRODUCTION In order to develop the critical-thinking skills needed to make efficient and effective decisions, managers and leaders need to be well- grounded in the general concepts of management. To gain this perspective, it becomes necessary to trace the evolution of these concepts in order to appreciate what roles the various major schools of thought are playing in today’s management theories. It should be noted at this point that the author feels that there is a real difference between managers and leaders. Although this difference will be discussed in Chapter 5, suffice it to say at this point that the author will not use the terms interchangeably as other writers in this area often do. As a starting point, Griffin (1999) defines the term management as: “A set of activities (including planning and decisionmaking, organizing, leading, and controlling) directed at an organization’s resources (human, financial, physical, and information) with the aim of achieving organizational goals in an efficient and effective manner” (p. 6). In the definition, several key concepts are used. First, it is understood that management applies “equally to public, private, nonprofit, and religious organizations.” Murphy (1974) made the point that ". . . management is an organizational phenomena and not exclusive to the world of profit organizations” (p. 7). The second issue in the definition is that the field of management is comprised of a universal process. This process with its distinct functions, as we will see in the discussion on the Administrative Approach section, that are interwoven and integral to every action taken by managers, whether they recognize it or not. The concept of an interwoven process will be discussed more in the Systems View of Management. The next point to be made is that the sole purpose of management is to focus the energies within an organization in order to achieve a common purpose. This purpose is normally formalized through the vision, mission statement, goals, and objectives of the organization. Although it is highly desirable that these forms of focus be formalized and made public to the individuals within an organization, their absence in writing does not mean that they do not exist. On the contrary, they live informally in the heads of the key decision- makers in an organization and are revealed through the orders of these people. The last issue to be addressed is the focus on efficiency and effectiveness. These terms are often confused and usually cause problems in fully understanding the concept of management. Simply put, efficiency focuses on maximizing the output derived from the use of each unit of input whether it is land, labor, capital, or information. Effectiveness, on the other hand, refers to whether the formalized mission, goals, and objectives of the organization have been accomplished. Thus, an organization becomes effectively organized when activities within that organization are established fo r the purpose of moving the organization toward accomplishing goals and objectives. Whether the organization is managed efficiently is another issue and is dependent on standards of productivity and the mission of the organization. In many organizations the choices are not so clear. Often redundant systems need to be established due to the fact that failure to accomplish a goal may be catastrophic from a human life perspective as in military organizations, or failure of the task will cause a total collapse of the organization. It becomes imperative that managers and leaders understand the double edge of this “effectiveness vs. efficiency” dilemma to make the best decisions for their organization. |
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