Management
Management is the process used to accomplish organizational goals through planning, organizing, directing and controlling people and other organizational resources.
The planning function is the capstone activity of management, which determine organisation’s objectives and establish the appropriate strategies for achieving those objectives.
After managers develop objectives and plans to achieve them, they must design and develop an organization that will be able to accomplish the objectives.
The next step is to begin to move the organization toward the objectives. Directing involves influencing the members of the organization to perform in the ways that accomplish the organisation’s objectives.
Finally, a manager must make sure that the actual performance of the organization conforms with the performance that was planned for the organization.
The management process doesn’t involve four separate activities but a group of closely related functions that usually occur simultaneously.
What is business?
“Business” is a word which is commonly used in many different languages. This broad, all-inclusive term can be applied to many kinds of enterprise. Business encompasses a broad range of action, from individual pursuits to the work of giant corporations.
The term “business” has at least three usages, depending on the scope:
The singular usage to mean a particular company or corporation;
The generalized usage to refer to a particular market sector and compound forms;
The broadest meaning to include all activities by the community of suppliers of goods and services.
Business is an increasingly important activity throughout the world. Millions of people are involved in making, buying, selling or supplying goods and services for money. They go into business to get a maximum profit.
Business is like life itself, a cycle – a continuous series of challenges, obstacles, economic movements and above all increasing and sophisticated competition that will always occur. An enterprise must continually re-invent and develop itself to remain relevant and successful. Unfortunately, business is not always brisk. There are periods when it drops off and businessmen sustain loss or even go out of business.
The importance of business cannot be overestimated. It is the means through which society’s standard of living improves.
Forms of trade
Commerce is a moving of goods from the man who wants to sell, to the man who is willing to buy, or as it is sometimes expressed, the exchange and distribution of goods and services.
There are different channels of distribution goods and the most important among them there are two aspects wholesale trade and retail trade. A business that acquires goods to sell to the general public is called retail trade. A wholesale business is a middlemen who help goods move from manufactures to consumers and then sell them in turn to the retailer. A middleman is any person that enters the distribution process between the manufacturer and the ultimate buyer.
The wholesaler or middleman buys in large quantities from the producer or manufacturer and sells in smaller quantities to the retailer, who, in his turn, supplies the individual customer.
The wholesaler is often economically indispensable. Being the link between the producer and the retailer, the wholesaler knows the demand and can estimate the quantities required.
The most common channel runs from the manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. This is the longest channel and requires the most markups. But it is often the most efficient, especially for dealing with small retailers. Retailer is the final link from the producer to consumer. It is he, who sells to the customer in the small quantities required and he who must be able to anticipate the customers’ needs.
The retailer gets his stock from a wholesaler either by ordering his goods after examining samples or patterns or by paying periodic visits to the wholesaler’s warehouse where, from range of goods that the wholesaler has bought from various manufacturers, the retailer can select those that he thinks will be most suited for the type of customer that buys from the shop.
The retailer’s primary role is to provide consumers with the products they want when and where they want them. That’s why there are so many retail stores and why retail competition is often so intense.
Buyers want to take a possession of a products at that time they buy it or soon after. So, a retailer who too frequently runs out of stock of popular items or sizes will quickly lose customers.