Management
The French word for housekeeping, ménagerie, derived from ménager ("to keep house"; compare ménage for "household"), also encompasses taking care of domestic animals.
Ménagerie is the French translation of Xenophon's famous book Oeconomicus[6] (Ancient Greek: Οἰκονομικός) on household matters and husbandry.
[15] As such, management is not the manipulation of a mechanism (machine or automated program), not the herding of animals, and can occur either in a legal or in an illegal enterprise or environment.
Top managers are responsible for making organization-wide decisions and establishing the plans and goals that affect the entire organization.
They set a "tone at the top" and develop strategic plans, company policies, and make decisions on the overall direction of the organization.
Some members of the senior management may serve as the public face of the organization, and they may make speeches to introduce new strategies or appear in marketing.
The board of directors is typically primarily composed of non-executives who owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders and are not closely involved in the day-to-day activities of the organization.
Helpful skills for top management vary by the type of organization but typically include a broad understanding of competition, world economies, and politics.
Some well-known senior executives in the US who did not complete a degree include Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
These typically comprise a four-year program designed to give students an overview of the role of managers in planning and directing within an organization.
Many colleges and universities also offer certificates and diplomas in business administration or management, which typically require one to two years of full-time study.
Managers are currently being trained to encourage greater equality of opportunities for minorities and women in the workplace, offering increased flexibility in working hours, better retraining, and innovative (and usually industry-specific) performance markers.
Managers destined for the service sector are being trained to use unique measurement techniques, better worker support, and more charismatic leadership styles.
However, innovations such as the spread of Arabic numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and control.
With the changing workplaces of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, military theory and practice contributed approaches to managing the newly popular factories.
[39] Given the scale of most commercial operations and the lack of mechanized record-keeping and recording before the Industrial Revolution, it made sense for most owners of enterprises in those times to carry out management functions by and for themselves.
But with the growing size and complexity of organizations, a distinction between owners (individuals, industrial dynasties, or groups of shareholders) and day-to-day managers (independent specialists in planning and control) gradually became more common.
The field of management originated in ancient China,[40] including possibly the first highly centralized bureaucratic state, and the earliest (by the second century BC) example of an administration based on merit through testing.
For example, Chinese general Sun Tzu in his 6th-century BC work The Art of War recommends[citation needed] (when re-phrased in modern terminology) being aware of and acting on strengths and weaknesses of both a manager's organization and a foe's.
[45][46][47][48] Thomas Taylor Meadows, Britain's consul in Guangzhou, argued in his Desultory Notes on the Government and People of China (1847) that "the long duration of the Chinese empire is solely and altogether owing to the good government which consists in the advancement of men of talent and merit only," and that the British must reform their civil service by making the institution meritocratic.
[52] French civil service examinations adopted in the late 19th century were also heavily based on general cultural studies.
[54] Other examples include the Indian Arthashastra by Chanakya (written around 300 BC), and The Prince by Italian author Niccolò Machiavelli (c. 1515).
[55] Written in 1776 by Adam Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher, The Wealth of Nations discussed efficient organization of work through division of labour.
[55][need quotation to verify] Classical economists such as Adam Smith (1723–1790) and John Stuart Mill (1806–1873) provided a theoretical background to resource allocation, production (economics), and pricing issues.
About the same time, innovators like Eli Whitney (1765–1825), James Watt (1736–1819), and Matthew Boulton (1728–1809) developed elements of technical production such as standardization, quality-control procedures, cost-accounting, interchangeability of parts, and work-planning.
The demand for trained managers led college and university administrators to consider and move forward with plans to create the first schools of business on their campuses.
In the early 20th century, people like Ordway Tead (1891–1973), Walter Scott (1869–1955) and J. Mooney applied the principles of psychology to management.
Other writers, such as Elton Mayo (1880–1949), Mary Parker Follett (1868–1933), Chester Barnard (1886–1961), Max Weber (1864–1920), who saw what he called the "administrator" as bureaucrat,[63] Rensis Likert (1903–1981), and Chris Argyris (born 1923) approached the phenomenon of management from a sociological perspective.
This typically involves making a profit (for the shareholders), creating valued products at a reasonable cost (for customers), and providing great employment opportunities for employees.
Figurehead, leader, liaison Nerve centre, disseminator, spokesperson Entrepreneur, negotiator, allocator, disturbance handler Management skills include:
