What is Management?
Management is the organizational process that includes strategic planning, setting; objectives, managing resources, deploying the human and financial assets needed to achieve objectives, and measuring results. Management also includes recording and storing facts and information for later use or for others within the organization. Management functions are not limited to managers and supervisors. Every member of the organization has some management and reporting functions as part of their job. http://home.earthlink.net/~ddstuhlman/defin1.
To manage is to affect the activity of a process and successful management achieves, to a degree, desired results. Knowledge of the process is not required — initially, since management may be “trial and error” until one learns “what works” in certain situations. However, knowledge of the processes and conditions that affect them is a great benefit for effective management. Two factors create great difficulty for effective management: complexity of the system and delays between the managerial action and the appearance of the results. If you poke a complex system, it responds. But if you poke it again and try to very carefully affect the system the same as before, you might get similar results at first, but it reveals results that you wouldn’t have expected from the first results. If you poke it again and try very carefully to do it as before, again the early results may be similar but become unique. Effective predictability is limited to early results. To manage a complex system requi
Management focuses on the entire organization from both a short and a long-term perspective. Management is the managerial process of forming a strategic vision, setting objectives, crafting a strategy and then implementing and executing the strategy. Management goes beyond the organizations internal operations to include the industry and the general environment. The key emphasis is on issues related to environmental scanning and industry analysis, appraisal of current and future competitors, assessment of core competencies, strategic control and the effective allocation of organizational resources.
