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Management: art or science?
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Management is the art and science of making appropriate choices.
To one degree or another, we are all involved in managing and are constantly making decisions concerning how to spend or use our resources.
Like most things in our modern, changing world, the function of management is becoming more complex. The role of the manager today is much different from what it was one hundred years, fifty years or even twenty-five years ago. At the turn of the century, for example, the business manager's objective was to keep his company running and to make a profit. Most firms were production oriented. Few constraints affected management's decisions. Governmental agencies imposed little regulations on business. The modern manager must now consider the environment in which the organisation operates and be prepared to adopt a wider perspective. That is, the manager must have a good understanding of management principles, an appreciation of the current issues and broader objectives of the total economic political, social, and ecological system in which we live, and he must posses the ability to analyze complex problems.
The modern manager must be sensitive, and responsive to the environment — that is he should recognize and be able to evaluate the needs of the total context in which his business functions, and he should act in accord with his understanding.
Modern management must posses the ability to interact in an evermore-complex environment and to make decisions that will allocate scarce resources effectively. A major part of the manager's job will be to predict what the environment needs and what changes will occur in the future.
Organizations exist to combine human efforts in order to achieve certain goals. Management is the process by which these human efforts are combined with each other and with material resources. Management encompasses both science and art. In designing and constructing plans and products, management must draw on technology and physical science, of course, and, the behavioral sciences also can contribute to management. However much you hear about "scientific management" or "management science", in handling people and managing organizations it is necessary to draw on intuition and subjective judgment. The science portion of management is expanding, more and more decisions can be analyzed and programmed, particularly with mathematics. But although the artistic side of management may be declining in its proportion of the whole process it will remain central and critical portion of your future jobs. In short:
Knowledge (science) without skill (art) is useless, or dangerous;
Skill (art) without knowledge (science) means stagnancy and inability to pass on learning;
Like the physician, the manager is a practitioner. As the doctor draws on basic sciences of chemistry, biology, and physiology, the business executive draws on the sciences of mathematics, psychology, and sociology.
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EXERCISES
Exercise 1. Answer the questions.
1. The function of management is becoming more complex. Why?
2. What must management possess nowadays?
3. Management encompasses both science and art. In what can we
see it?
Exercise 2. Translate the following text into Russian in written form.
People working for a company are referred as its workforce, employees, staff, or personnel and are on its payroll.
In some context, especially more conservative ones, employees and workforce refer to those working on the shopfloor of a factory actually making things. Similarly, staff is sometimes used to refer only to managers and office-based workers. This traditional division is also found in the expressions white-collar and blue-collar.
Another traditional division is that between management and labor.
Personnel departments are usually involved in finding new staff and recruiting them, hiring them, or taking them on, in a process of recruitment. Someone recruited is a recruit, or in American English only, a hire.
They are also involved when people are made to leave the organization, or fired. These responsibilities are referred to, relatively informally, as hiring and firing. If you leave the job voluntarily, you quit.
Middle-managers are now most often mentioned in the context of re-engineering, delaying, downsizing, or rightsizing: all these expressions describe the recent trend for companies to reduce the numbers of people they employ, often by getting rid of layers of managers from the middle of hierarchy.
An organization that has undergone this process is lean and its hierarchy is flat.
Exercise 3. Translate the following text into Russian in written form.
Classification of Organization Cultures
(Adapted from Prof.C.Handy)
1. Power Cultures
In these cultures self-reliant and highly competitive self-development provides the basis of relations. A manager's success is related to their charisma and influence, rather than to their knowledge and experience. The style of the chief executive is the model for other managers. In organizations of this type managers need to be tough-minded and aggressive.
2. Role Cultures
In these cultures a manager's role is completely related to then-place within a cenralized system. Their success depends on how well they adhere to rules, procedures, and precedents. Individualism and aggression are not valued in these cultures. Employees in these organizations should not exceed the limits of their roles.
3. Task Cultures
In organizations of this type they value everything that makes it possible ‘to get the work done'. The main concern in these organizations is successful completion of their projects. A manager's success to their knowledge and experience required to achieve on to meet the requirements of their role.
4. Individual Cultures
In organizations of this type freedom of expression is valued the most. Effectiveness of any activity in these organizations is rated by how much the activity satisfies the staff, rather than by how well it conforms to business plans. Independence, creativity, and experiment are also valued in these organizations.
Exercise 4.. Translate the following sentences.
1. They reserved the right to make managerial decision.
2. What you need is advice from your bank manager.
3. I wish you could manage the time to come and to talk to us.
4. Private banks are being nationalized, and are to be managed with workers' participation.
5. They are part of my management team.
6. The baby can be greatly influenced by the parents' management.
7. She has been working as the manageress of a bookshop.
8. It is perfectly manageable task to tackle systematically.
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