The Management in Principle
With some critical insight into the affairs of the times, an American philosopher some years ago christened our epoch that of "the managerial revolution". By his choice of label he meant to emphasize, that in contrast to the bygone period of "the industrial revolution", when the mainspring of economic progress lay in technological development, the contemporary era depended for its motive power on personal skills of leadership and commercial acumen i.e. the ability of some men and women to impel economic progress by their direction and coordinating of other people`s individual efforts in the business of living. Divine Providence did not leave him long enough on Earth to see how accurately his appraisal would hold true. This was so even in circumstances where once again the technological factor exerted a major force for within a decade, the world of industry and commerce had entered on to another transformation,with highly complex automatic equipment and intricate electronic instrumentation as the foundations.
Science and technology are today coming to their full fruition.
Accumulated knowledge garnered by patient painstaking labors in the backroom is now borne in triumph to the board room; hardly a business can continue its affairs without some reference to scientific principles and the technological applications. But there is no reversion to a mechanistic dominance: the era remains correctly dubbed that of "managerial revolution". For one thing above all else is receiving universal acclaim,that the harnessing of science and technical knowledge is a task for "management". Exactly what that term means is not always clear,and not always agreed. What is clear and agreed is that it does mean some form of personal command of a situation such that technological,commercial and human aspect are interwoven into successful progress. Within a generation the British industrial scene has in this respect indeed undergone a revolution.
Twenty years ago opinion was all but unanimous in the view that managers are born,not made - those currently in office,of course,being obviously born destined by gift to the roles held.
Concurrent was the view that management did not matter much anyway. To be technically competent or commercially capable was all that mattered:some mysterious over - pervading force ensured successful outcome,whatever the standard of leadership.
The current-day contrast is seen most starkly in the daily and Sunday press:column-inches by the score,heavily in-boxed and lettered show enterprises large and small, to be counted, pleading with the younger generation to come forward and be paid handsomely for being trained in management.Managers,clearly are made, not born!
Throughout the year, conferences provide the continuous platform for the incessant crusade for more and better management. A national management institute can count its members in tens of thousands. The Universities can claim a large volume of their annual output poured into management careers; serious business leaders can recurrently discuss among themselves the ways and means of raising management standards. All this in the setting of an age when nuclear power, space-satellites and radiation technology are the characteristic features of progress. Truly an era of "managerial revolution", when the harvesting of the fruits of technical achievement is vitally dependent on the skills of management - whatever these happen to be.
Those last few words are more important than a passing quip,for they point to one of the major weaknesses in the contemporary scene.There has indeed been substantial advancement in management practice,and a vast extension in the range,scope and depth of management studies;yet,curiously,there seems to be still no accepted understanding of the nature of the management role or of the skill it entails - no authorized version,as it were, of management principles or of the essential themes in the gospel that is preached. This is not to imply that the nature of management is not of itself understood: On the contrary, a clear analysis has been available as long as the earlier edition of the present volume, and before.
There is, however, no accepted, universally adopted definition in the sense in which the scientist knows that all his confreres accept the one meaning for the one particular term.Not that this matters seriously; the differences are superficial rather than substantial, and in the event most managers appear to be doing much the same things in practice,whatever their theoretical understanding of their role. The drawback in this situation lies in the obstacles it creates to the advancement of knowledge and the pursuit of systematic studies.
Where every man can claim to be his own authority,orderly cognitive argument is difficult;and management is now in the stage of development when it can benefit materially from the analytical review of experience and constructive interchange of rationally based ideas. Like any body of knowledge,it can draw progress from disciplined comparative study.
In this respect,management suffers from the drawback inherent in its own setting:it is an employment undertaken and a skill practiced by many thousands of persons in many different industrial and commercial communities - as well as in many other fields - within organizations of widely differing character and size,with numerous differences of objective and varieties of personal composition. It has evolved numerous techniques for more effective performance, yet these are "tools" for carrying out a skill of which the real character is still imperfectly recognized.
That there should be many controversies about the relative importance of various aspect of management is but a natural consequence of such a situation.Among the many persons who are occupationally engaged in management, most have qualified earlier in their industrial or commercial careers in specialized technical or professional fields - as engineers, chemists, accountants,company secretaries, and the like. They have risen to higher executive positions through years spent in the specialized practice of their profession or technology.
Hence they tend,naturally enough,to have a bias or inclination to see management from a certain standpoint,and often lack the capacity to see it as a whole. Ready illustrations of this tendency come to the mind of anyone with first - hand knowledge of the affairs of industry or commerce. To the engineer,for instance,management is primarily a matter of the design of product and the design of tools, associated with the layout of production flows and the field that has come to be labeled "production engineering",from these it is but a small step to questions of planning, rate-fixing,piece-rates, bonus systems and other techniques that link up the technical operations with the daily activities of the operatives.
To the accountant, management looms largely as a matter of figures;he is interested in the statistical data that record progress,usually couched in money terms;his interest is accordingly centered on procedures which enable him to "control" expenditure and to identify the expenditure with its outcome,and which show themselves in summary form in Profit and Loss Statements and Annual Balance Sheets.
Newer lines of thought are less concerned with the recording of past financial history comparison of this year`s progress with last year`s,than with routines for the "control" of current expenditure against appropriate pre-determined standards.If one turns to yet another branch of technical industry,to the chemist,management appears primarily as a matter of formula and mixtures,the flow of semi-solids,liquids or gases though a series of plant in which given chemical changes are carried out,and in which the most important requirements are the control of temperatures and pressures,the control of ingredients and of the quality of the emerging mixtures;the chemical manager`s processes are running right if the readings are in accordance with the best standards,and if the samples at various stages of process come up to the formula set.
To pick out the technical bias of managers in a technical field is not to imply criticism of such executive themselves.They have been trained and developed in a given atmosphere:their whole background has been concentrated on aspect of their technology,and,in the absence of any guide as to what management is or means,one cannot rightly blame them if their rise into the higher executive levels finds them unable to depart from the customary technological or professional standards to which they have for so long been subject.
Within the present generation a great deal of attention has been given to the "human factor"- an interest arising out of the wartime need to secure a higher level of labor utilization,emanating primarily from the shortage of man-power.Experience gained in these abnormal conditions taught industrial managers that the productivity of people at work is enhanced by improvements in the physical and social environment of their work and by the promotion of a sense of participation in its achievement - such participation being not only effective performance of the allotted job,but in addition a sense that their contribution is of importance to major objectives and to the well-being of the organization.
Developments in this more human aspect of management have in their turn given rise to yet another specialist bias,this time in the direction of the human being.They have led many persons,erroneously,to the view that the specialist personnel aspect of management should dominate all others,and a new professional field of "personnel management" has emerged to parallel the more factual approach of the engineer and the accountant.
The detached observer can see the true position,that each of these specialist aspects is but a part of management,that all have a contribution to make to the total.The true character of management must be seen as a process or skill compounded of several essential elements,many of which are steeped in the traditional technologies,and each of which has its own contribution to make to the effective working of that process as a whole.