What is Management about?

Very often we hear someone shout ‘just manage it!’ - Manage what? In fact, many of us use such similar terms without as a practice, but a quick re-look at this gives us the gist of management.

What do we mean, when we ask someone to mange it! – Essentially asking his/her to make choices and deciding. With this understanding let’s look at this process of decision making.

Why is making choices equated to management? Choices made by executives or workers are decision in the context of companies; and these decisions in many cases have a phenomenal impact on the present and the future of the company. Therefore, making right decision is the secret of successful management.

Decision making being an important success factor, needs to deal with innumerable “trade-offs” – Be it people or process, people or money, now or later and so on. We deal with Trade-offs in another post in detail, but handling these trade-offs and making these decisions is the core of effective management.

Institutional courses on management generally work at breaking this rather complex “trade-off decision” couplet to increase simplicity and understanding at the cost of complexity and macro view of the problem. Hence such course though give a theoretical understanding would rely heavily on the aptitude of the “manager” (the one making the decision in the given situation).

Any management decision made is only complete in the context of the situation and the complete understanding of the problem. This is one of the reason why case-study and role-plays from an effective tool for teaching such management (in short, effective decision making).

To improve as a manager – focus on your decision making skills and work at comprehensively tackling these trade-off that you so often encounter.

Read Kannada article: http://somanagement.blogspot.com/2011/02/blog-post.html