Planning In Business

Management is the act of directing and controlling a large group of people for the purpose of coordinating and harmonizing the group towards accomplishing a goal beyond the scope of individual effort. Management encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources, and natural resources. Management can also refer to the person or people who performs the act of management.

The verb Manage comes from the Italian maneggiare (to handle -- especially a horse), which in turn derives from the Latin manus (hand). The French word mesnagement (later mйnagement) influenced the development in meaning of the English word management in the 17th and 18th centuries.[1]

Management has to do with power by position, whereas leadership involves power by influence[citation needed]. Compare stewardship.

Contents [hide]

1 Functions of management

2 Theoretical scope

3 Historical development

3.1 19th century

3.2 20th century

3.3 21st century

4 Nature of managerial work

5 The importance of control

6 Managerial levels/hierarchy

7 References

8 See also

8.1 Lists

9 Citations

[edit] Functions of management

Management operates through various functions, often classified as planning, organizing, leading/motivating and controlling.

Planning: deciding what has to happen in the future (today, next week, next month, next year, over the next five years, etc.) and generating plans for action.

Organizing: making optimum use of the resources required to enable the successful carrying out of plans.

Leading/Motivating: exhibiting skills in these areas for getting others to play an effective part in achieving plans.

Controlling: monitoring -- checking progress against plans, which may need modification based on feedback.

[edit] Theoretical scope

Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), who wrote on the topic in the early twentieth century, defined management as "the art of getting things done through people". [2] One can also think of management functionally, as the action of measuring a quantity on a regular basis and of adjusting some initial plan; or as the actions taken to reach one's intended goal. This applies even in situations where planning does not take place. From this perspective, Frenchman Henri Fayol [3] considers management to consist of five functions:

planning

organizing

leading

co-ordinating

controlling

Some people, however, find this definition, while useful, far too narrow. The phrase "management is what managers do" occurs widely, suggesting the difficulty of defining management, the shifting nature of definitions, and the connection of managerial practices with the existence of a managerial cadre or class.

One habit of thought regards management as equivalent to "business administration", although this then excludes management in places outside commerce, as for example in charities and in the public sector. Nonetheless, many people refer to university departments which teach management as "business schools", and some institutions (such as the Harvard Business School) use that name.

Speakers of English may also use the term "management" or "the management" as a collective word describing the managers of an organization, for example of a corporation.

[edit] Historical development

Difficulties arise in tracing the history of management. Some see it (by definition) as a late modern (in the sense of late modernity) conceptualization. On those terms it cannot have a pre-modern history, only harbingers (such as stewards). Others, however, detect management-like activities in the pre-modern past. Some writers trace the development of management-thought back to Sumerian traders and to the builders of the pyramids of ancient Egypt. Slave-owners through the centuries faced the problems of exploiting/motivating a dependent but sometimes unenthusiastic or recalcitrant workforce, but many pre-industrial enterprises, given their small scale, did not feel compelled to face the issues of management systematically. However, innovations such as the spread of Hindu-Arabic numerals (5th to 15th centuries) and the codification of double-entry book-keeping (1494) provided tools for management assessment, planning and control.

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 growing size and complexity of organizations, the split between owners (individuals, industrial dynasties or groups of shareholders) and day-to-day managers (independent specialists in planning and control) gradually became more common.

[edit] 19th century

Some argue [citation needed] that modern management as a discipline began as an off-shoot of economics in the 19th century. Classical economists such as Adam Smith (1723 - 1790) and John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873) provided a theoretical background to resource-allocation, production, 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. Many of these aspects of management existed in the pre-1861 slave-based sector of the US economy. That environment saw 4 million people, as the contemporary usages had it, "managed" in profitable quasi-mass production.

By the late 19th century, marginal economists Alfred Marshall (1842