Italian | Translation in English |
O mio babbino caro | O my dear papa |
- This song is a type of opera (or better called 'aria'). It was made by Giacomo Puccini. And, sung by Lauretta. (Copied from Wikipedia.)
The true teacher knocks down the idol that the
student makes of him.
-Rumi
What Is Management:
What managers do is management. Formally speaking, management is coordinating and overseeing the work activities of others so that their activities are completed efficiently and effectively.
What Managers Do?
Functions
Roles
How Manager's job Is Changing
What Is an Organization Where Manager Works?
Def: Organization is a deliberate arrangement of people to accomplishsome specific purpose. Traditional organization are being replaced by contemporary organization beacuse the world is in change.
It has three elements: Distinct Purpose (goals or set of goals); Deliberate Structure (structure is their to unable people to do work); People (a persoan working alone is not an organization). When they all overlap each other, lo! an organization is formed.
Why Study Management?
Even if are majoring in marketing, finance, accounting, sciences or art, we can explain to you the need of looking at management from its own view-point. We would like appreciate management on these basis:
All things are created twice.
We create them first in our minds, and then we work to bring them into physical existence. By taking control of our own first creation, we can write or re-write our own scripts, thus taking some control and responsibility for the outcome. We write or re-write our scripts using our imagination and conscience.
Two Creations
First is leadership - what do I/we want to accomplish? (determines right or wrong)
Second is management - how can I best accomplish it? (efficiency)
According to Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things."
Self-Actualization:
the most effective way to begin with the end in mind is to develop personal mission statement, creeed or philosophy. It focuses on what you want to be (character), do (contributions and achievements) and on the values and principles upon which your being and doing are based. "The personal mission statement gives us a changeless core from which we can deal with external change."
'Viktor Frankel developed a philosophy called "Logotherapy". Logotherapy helps an individual detect his unique meaning or mission in life by reexamining his personal vision and values to assure they are based on principles and reality.'
Centre of Our Being:
We must reexamine the center of our life. Our center is the source of our security, guidance, wisdom and power. Making people or things outside ourselves important places ourselves at the mercy of mood swings, inconsistent behavior and uncontrollable changes of fortune. Being self-centered is too limiting - people develop poor mental health in isolation.
Principle-Centered Life:
By centering our lives on correct principles, we create a stable, solid foundation for the development of our life support factors and embrace and encompass the truly important areas of our lives. Successful relationships, achievement and financial security will radiate from the principle center.
Principles of Life:
The principles we base our lives on should be deep, fundamental truths, classic truths based on perennial wisdom.
Re-Scripting your Life:
Imagination In developing your personal mission statement, you can use your creative ability to imagine life milestones such as birthdays, anniversaries, retirement and funerals. What accomplishments would you like to celebrate? Visualize them in rich detail.
You can make your mission statement balanced and easier to work with by breaking it down into the specific role areas of your life and the goals you want to accomplish in each area.
If you find your actions aren't congruent with your mission statement, you can create affirmations to improve. An affirmation should have five ingredients: it should be personal, positive, present tense, visual and emotional.
Visulisation and Aiffirmation:
You can also use visualization techniques.
"Affirmation and visualization are both self programming techniques that should be used in harmony with correct principles."
A family mission statement is an expression of its true foundation, its shared vision and values.
Organizational mission statements should be developed by everyone in the organization. If there is no involvement in the process, there will be no commitment to the statement. Organizational mission statement must be known to everyone in the organization.
Decision making Process:
Introduction:
First you detect a problem. Your home ceiling is in bad order. You wish not that clumsy ceiling, you want a refined and cemented and well-painted ceiling. That's a real problem. Ok. So you pick all of your tools or hire a constructor and get your ceiling anew. And, after doing so you will probably check whether its up to your expectation or not. A job well carried out.
But have you noticed you've done what exactly we call decision making process? If not time has come just to realize that.
Decision-making process (D.M.P):
A wholistic comprehensve process... Not merely selecting of alternatives. Not identifying the problem. Not merely reevaluating decisiosn effectiveness. Rather integration of all of them. DMP is an all-relevant process for all seasons and ages! Its as relevent to your personal decision about which class to bunk as it is to a billion-dollar corporate deal.
What is a Problem: A discrepency or 'gap' between an existing and a desired state of affair.
8 Step The Process:
1. Identifying the problem (watch-out for symptoms of a deeper problem, they're not the problem),
2. Identifying decision criteria (determine what's relevant in a decision)
3. Allocating Wieghts to the criteria (giving correct priority)
4. Developing Alternatives (don't you need best of the best?)
5. Analyzing Alternatives (evaluating the alternatives against step 2 & 3)
6. Selecting an alternative
7. Implementing the alternative (putting the decision into actions)
8. Evaluating Decision Effectiveness (see Part 6 of book).
How are decisions made?
We are here dealing with decisions in management functions. Decisions in management are of four types - planning, organizing, leading and controlling. When managers do these activities they're called decision makers.
There are three ways of looking at how decisions are made:
Types of Problems & Conditions in Decision Making:
Types of Problems: There are total of two major problems which managers face in approaching to a problem with DMP.
Who gets which?
-Low-level mangers - they face structured problems
-Upper-level managers - they deal with nonprogrammed problems.
Decision-Making Conditions: Multiplicity and diversity is everywhere, decision-making, no exceptions. Therefore, there are three conditions managers face as they make decisions:
Decision-Making Styles:
Directive Style: they tend to have low level tolerance for incomplete information and are highly rationalistic. (Thinker)
Analytic Style: they tend to have high level tolerance for ambiguity and their way of thinking is rationalistic. (Sensor)
Conceptual Style: Intuitively they think and keep high level acceptance for ambiguity. (Intuitor.)
Behavioral Style: They think intuitively while having low-level tolerance for ambiguity. (Feeler.)
Biases and Errors in Decision Making:
Humans are humans. Their professional decision making goes not without having a mark of their nature on it. Thus they can commit mistakes in the form of biases and trivial errors - overconfidence, sunk cost (lack of realisation that today's actions cannot rectify past's mistakes), randomness, availability, self-serving bias, selective perception (narrow-mindedness), hindsight bias etc.
Americans feel better with Americans, Japanese with Japanese, Pakistanis with Pakistanis and so on. My question to you is you don't you open up? Understand Cultural differences. Carlos ghosn did this in Nissan in1999 as he was the first ever non-japanese in Nissan. Yet he changed many persisting traditions in the company. In Japanese culture people with old-age and long experience mostly reached at higher levels. It wasn't happening on the basis of performance, primarily. Ghosn changed this paradigm as well the tradition. But how? He was able to resolve this apparent conflictin proposition on the basis of securing respect of his employees, in the first place. Japanese who worked with him, never doubted him.
One day a friend visited Hodja (a fictional classical Turkish fool) and said, "Hodja, I want to borrow your donkey."
"I am sorry," replied Hodja, "but I've already lent it out to someone else."
As soon as he said this, the donkey brayed.
"But Hodja, I can hear the donkey! It's in the stable."
Shutting the door in this friend's face, Hodja told him with dignity, "A man who believes the word of a donkey above my own doesn't deserve to be let anything!"
Empson, in his The Structure of Complex Words, beautifully explains "the way in which the word 'fool' [in the preceding example] works, displaying not only the single meaning required by the immediate context, but also those meanings implicit in the word which fit the greater context of the play". To quote Empson:But thought's the slave of life, and time's fool;
And time, that makes survey of all the world,
Must have a stop. O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthly and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue.
(1 Henry IV V, iv, 81)
'Hotspur means chiefly that life is cheated by time, because our apparently great opportunities all end in death; but this might be a comfort, since the same end would come even if he were not defeated. Life is made ridiculous by time; we are clowns because our pretensions make such a contrast with our end. But if time keeps us as clowns we in our turn mock at time; we criticise it, and know better. There was room here for a prophecy; he dies still ready to gibe [taunt] at the House of Lancaster.'
Thus, now we can appreciate truly that literature is aesthetic by its features; such vastness and density it enjoys, which is well beyond the capacity of routine-use of language. Literature, I call it, the jewel of language.
