Chapter 1 - The Management Process Today
What is Management?
Management is the planning, organizing, leading and controlling of human and other resources to achieve
organizational goals efficiently and effectively.
Organization: collection of people working together to achieve their goals.
Achieving High Performance: A Manager’s Goal
Organizational performance is a measure of how efficiently and effectively managers use resources to satisfy
customers and achieve organizational goals.
Efficiency is a measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve goals;
so organizations are efficient when the amount of input resources or the amount of time needed to produce a
given output of goods or services is minimized.
Effectiveness is a measure of the appropriateness of the goals that managers have selected for the
organization to pursue and of the degree to which the organization achieves its goals.
Organizations are effective when appropriate goals are chosen and achieved.
High effectiveness, low efficiency: product that customer want but too expensive
Low effectiveness, low efficiency: low quality, customer doesn’t want
High effectiveness, high efficiency: good quality product, good price Figure p.6
Low effectiveness, high efficiency: high quality product, no one wants it
Essential Managerial Tasks
Managerial Functions are planning, organizing, leading and controlling. How well managers perform these
functions determines how efficient and effective their organizations are.
Planning: is a process that managers use to identify and select appropriate organizational goals and course of
action to best achieve those goals.
Steps:
1. Deciding which goals the organisation will pursue.
2. Decide which courses of action/strategies to adopt to attain those goals.
3. Deciding how to allocate organizational resources to pursue the strategies that attain those goals.
Strategy: the outcome of planning, is a cluster of decisions concerning what organizational goals to pursue,
what actions to take, and how to use resources to achieve goals.
Organizing: establishing task and authority (working) relationships that allow organizational members to work
together and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. (organizing people into departments, organizing
(human) resources)
Leading: Motivate, coordinate behaviors/activities and energize people to work together to achieve
organizational goals, members need to follow.
Controlling: establish accurate measuring and monitoring systems to evaluate how well an organization has
achieved its goals and to take any corrective actions needed to maintain or improve performance.