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Chapter 1: The Exceptional Manager

The Exceptional Manager: What You Do, How You Do It

School of Business Organization

  • Definition: A group of people who work together to achieve some specific purpose.
  • Managers operate within many types of organizations.

The Art of Management Defined

  • Management:
    1. The pursuit of organizational goals efficiently and effectively.
    2. Integrating the work of people.
    3. Planning, organizing, leading, and controlling the organization’s resources.
  • Efficiency: To use resources—people, money, raw materials—wisely and cost-effectively.
  • Effectiveness: To achieve results, make the right decisions, and successfully carry them out to achieve the organization’s goals.

Rewards of Studying Management

  • Understand how to deal with organizations from the outside.
  • Understand how to relate to supervisors.
  • Understand how to interact with co-workers.
  • Understand how to manage yourself in the workplace.

Rewards of Practicing Management

  • Experience a sense of accomplishment with employees.
  • Stretch abilities and magnify range.
  • Build a catalog of successful products or services.
  • Become a mentor and help others.

The Management Process

  • Planning: Setting goals and deciding how to achieve them.
  • Organizing: Arranging tasks, people, and other resources to accomplish the work.
  • Leading: Motivating, directing, and influencing people to work hard to achieve organizational goals.
  • Controlling: Monitoring performance, comparing it with goals, and taking corrective action as needed.

Question #2

  • Laura runs a sales and expense report at the end of each workday. Which management function is she performing?
    • Answer: C. Controlling

Levels of Management

Levels and Areas of Management

  • Levels of Management:
    • Top Managers
    • Middle Managers
    • First-Line Managers
    • Nonmanagerial employees
  • Areas:
    • R&D
    • Marketing
    • Finance
    • Production
    • Human Resources

Four Levels of Management

  1. Top Managers
    • Make long-term decisions about the overall direction of the organization.
    • Establish objectives, policies, and strategies.
  2. Middle Managers
    • Implement the policies and plans of top managers.
    • Supervise and coordinate the activities of first-line managers.
  3. First-Line Managers
    • Make short-term operating decisions.
    • Direct the daily tasks of nonmanagerial personnel.
  4. Team Leader
    • Responsible for facilitating team activities toward achieving key results.

Functional vs. General Managers

  • Functional Manager: Responsible for just one organizational activity (e.g., director of finance, VP of production).
  • General Manager: Responsible for several organizational activities (e.g., executive VP, executive director for a nonprofit).

Three Types of Managerial Roles

  • Interpersonal Roles: Interact with people inside and outside their work units (figurehead, leader, liaison).
  • Informational Roles: Receive and communicate information (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson).
  • Decisional Roles: Use information to make decisions to solve problems or take advantage of opportunities (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator).

Roles Managers Must Play Successfully: Mintzberg’s Useful Findings

  1. A manager relies more on verbal than on written communication.
  2. A manager works long hours at an intense pace.
  3. A manager’s work is characterized by fragmentation, brevity, and variety.

The Skills Exceptional Managers Need

  • Technical Skills: Job-specific knowledge needed to perform well in a specialized field.
  • Conceptual Skills: The ability to think analytically, to visualize an organization as a whole, and understand how the parts work together.
  • Human Skills (Soft Skills): The ability to work well in cooperation with other people to get things done; the ability to motivate, inspire trust, and communicate with others.

Question #4

  • CEO Gary Kelly sets the direction and strategy for Southwest Airlines. What type of managerial role is he performing?
    • Answer: C. Decisional

Challenges of Managers

Challenges to Being an Exceptional Manager

  1. Managing for competitive advantage.
  2. Managing for information technology.
  3. Managing for diversity.
  4. Managing for globalization.
  5. Managing for ethical standards.
  6. Managing for sustainability.
  7. Managing for happiness and meaningfulness.

Managing for Competitive Advantage

  • Competitive Advantage: The ability of an organization to produce goods or services more effectively than competitors do, thereby outperforming them.
  • Having a competitive advantage means:
    1. Being responsive to customers.
    2. Innovation: finding ways to deliver better goods or services.
    3. Quality: making improvements in quality so that consumers choose your product.
    4. Efficiency: avoiding overstaffing and overuse of raw materials.

Managing for Information Technology

  • By 2019, consumers worldwide were projected to spend 3.55 trillion online, double that of 2015.
  • Information technology has led to the growth of e-business, using the Internet to facilitate every aspect of running a business.

Managing for Diversity

  • The future won’t resemble the past. Consider:
    • Non-Hispanic whites are projected to decrease from 62\% of the population in 2014 to 43\% in 2060.
    • In 2030, nearly one in five U.S. residents is expected to be 65 and older.
    • In the coming years, there will be a different mix of women, immigrants, and older people in the general population, as well as in the workforce.

Managing for Globalization

  • American firms have been going out into the world in a major way, even as the world has been coming to us.

Managing for Ethical Standards

  • Ethical behavior is not just a nicety.
    • In 2008, Bernie Madoff confessed to a 50 billion Ponzi scheme and was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
    • Former Tyco International CEO Dennis Kozlowski served prison time for grand larceny, securities fraud, and tax evasion.
    • WorldCom head Bernard Ebbers served 25 years for fraud.

Managing for Sustainability

  • Sustainability: Economic development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
  • A changing climate has brought the issue of being “green” to increased prominence.
  • Companies like PepsiCo, Walmart, and UPS have recognized that corporations have a responsibility to address the causes of climate change.

Managing for Happiness and Meaningfulness

  • Many people agree that being a manager doesn’t make them happy.
  • Research shows that a sense of meaningfulness in life is associated with better health, work and life satisfaction, and performance.
  • Build meaning into your life by:
    • Identifying activities you love doing.
    • Finding a way to build your natural strengths into your personal and work life.
    • Helping someone.

Question #5

  • John wants his salespeople to use Salesforce.com to improve their sales. Which challenge is he trying to manage?
    • Answer: B. Information Technology