“Management” is an umbrella that covers a host of activities: leadership, working through others, planning, organizing, communicating, controlling, and making decisions, to name a few. How can you grasp all of these things? Fortunately, you don’t have to.
The basis of effective management tactics activity is to keep control of a situation without enough information, assets, or power to justify that control. That, as it happens, is also the essence of management.
In some ways management needs no introduction. Most of us do it one way or another every dayin families, social groups, clubs, and businesses. Management is universal; it exists whenever two or more people try to do something together. You may not notice this, however, because only mismanagement makes headlines. Planes arrive late, companies go bankrupt, orders are lost, and the Pentagon pays defense contractors several hundred dollars for parts that cost a few bucks Wal-Mart because management has somehow failed.
People become managers by several routes. Those who work for family-owned firms inherit the job. Others may have worked their way up the organization or married the...