2. At the company

CLASS 5

TASK: Read and discuss the following text

1. Management

The word management comes from Old French menagement which means "the art of conducting, directing" (from Latin manu agere "to lead hand"). Management is the process of leading and directing all or part of an organization, often a business, through the deployment of resources (human, financial, material, intellec­tual or intangible).

Some writers trace the development of management thought back to Shumerian traders and ancient Egyptian pyramid builders. Slave-owners through the centuries faced the problems of exploiting and motivating dependent but sometimes resistant workforce. How­ever, many pre-industrial enterprises, taking into account their small size, did not have to think about management systematically. But 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 accountancy, planning and control.

Modern management as a discipline began as an offshoot of economics in the 19^th century. Classical economists, such as Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, provided a theoretical background to resource allocation, production, and pricing issues. At the same time, such inno­vators as James Watt and Matthew Boulton developed technical pro­duction elements such as standardization, quality control procedures, cost accounting, interchangeability of parts, and work planning.

By the middle of the 19th century, Robert Owen, Henry Poor, and M. Laughlin introduced the human element with theories of worker training, motivation, and organizational structure.

By the late 19th century, marginal economists Alfred Marshall and Leon Walras introduced a new layer of complexity to the theory of management. Joseph Wharton offered the first course in management in 1881. By 1900 there were managers trying to place their theories on a scientific basis. J. Duncan wrote the first college management text book in 1911.

The first comprehensive theories of management appeared around 1920. Henri Fayol and Alexander Church described various branches of management and their interrelationships. In the early 20th century, Walter Scott applied the principles of psychology to management, while other writers, such as Elton Mayo, Max Weber, approached the phenomenon of management from a sociological perspective.

Ronald Fisher, and Thorton C. Fry introduced statistical tech­niques into management. In the 1940s, Patrick Blackett combined these statistical theories with microeconomic theory and developed the science of operations research. Operations research, sometimes known as "management science", attempts to take a scientific approach to solving management problems, particularly in the areas of logistics, and operations.

Modern management consists of a number of separate branches, in­cluding human resource management, operations or production man­agement, strategic management, marketing management, financial management, and information technology management.

Strategic management is the process of specifying an organiza­tion's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve these objec­tives, and allocating resources so as to implement the plans. It is the highest level of managerial activity, usually performed by the com­pany's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and executive team. It pro­vides overall direction to the whole enterprise. An organization's strategy must be appropriate for its resources, circumstances, and ob­jectives. The process involves matching the companies" strategic ad­vantages to the business environment the organization faces. One ob­jective of an overall corporate strategy is to put the organization into a position to carry out its mission effectively and efficiently. A good corporate strategy should integrate an organization's goals, policies, and tactics into a whole.

Marketing management is the practical application of marketing techniques. It is the analysis, planning, implementation, and control of programs designed to create, build, and maintain mutually beneficial exchanges with target markets. The marketing manager has the task of influencing the level and composition of demand in way that will achieve organizational objectives.