What is
Management?
“elcapitan-savedforweb” by waswisgirl1is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Today’s Lecture
•What Managers do.
•Managerial Roles
•The Job
•An Overview of Business
•Factors of Production
“The scarcest, most valuable resource in business is no longer financial capital. It’s
talent. If you doubt that, just watch how hard companies are battling for the best
people…. Talent of every type is in short supply, but the greatest shortage of all is
skilled, effective managers.“ – Fortune magazine
What is Management?
Management is the process of assembling and using sets of
resources in a goal-directed manner to accomplish tasks in an
organizational setting.
“A messy hectic stream of ongoing activity”
Regardless of your field, you
WILL manage people over the
course of your career.
It is inevitable, because humans
are organizing, social animals.
What Managers Do
•Composed of
•Frequent task switching
•Dealing with people
•Making plans
•Organizing through conversation
•Navigating Paradoxes
•Opportunity search and exploitation
•We’ll see all of these topics this
•semester in some form
•In essence though, POLC.
Control Organize
Lead
Plan
Manage
Navigating Paradoxes
•Integration/Fragmentation
•Sometimes teams need to work together to accomplish goals, sometimes it is better
for them to work on their own.
•Consistency/Flexibility
A primary challenge of being a manager is figuring out the right
thing to do when there is more than one good/bad path.
