 Dear learners, welcome to Krishnakanda Kuntikoye State Open University. Today we are going to discuss about management on this program called Introduction to Management. So what is management? When you talk about management, there are some key words that we need to understand. Number one, organization. What is an organization? There are two or more people who work together in a structured way to achieve a specified goal or set of goals. Number two, what do you mean by goals? Purposes that an organization strives to achieve. Organizations often have more than one goal. Goals are fundamental elements of an organization. Third, the role of management. The role of management is to guide organizations towards goal accomplishment. So when we talk about management, the first three things that should come to your mind is number one, organization, goals and the role of management. So what is an organization? A formal and coordinated group of people who function to achieve a particular goal. So you see, it is a formal, it is not an informal, it is a formal and coordinated group. It is like an orchestra. You cannot have one person playing something different, the other person playing something different. It is like an orchestra. Everyone is playing the same tune, a formal and coordinated group of people who function to achieve a particular goal. An organization has a structure. We'll come to this. What is a structure? An organization consists of a group of people. A single person may not be an organization. It has to be a group of people striving to reach goals that individuals acting alone cannot achieve. This is a very, very important concept that the group of people striving to reach goals that individuals acting alone could not achieve. So you see an organization structure. You'll have a boss and you'll have a number of subordinates. The organization could become bigger and bigger and bigger, like below the subordinate you can have another set of people. So it can be a big thing, but basically the basic structure is something like this. Who is a manager? A manager is one who plans. These are all very, very important words. Plans, organizers, directs and controls the allocation of human, material, financial and information resources in pursuit of the organization's goals. Each word is very important. He is responsible for directing the efforts of people in the organization aimed at helping organizations achieve their goals. So let us understand management now once again. Management refers to the tasks and activities involved in directing an organization or one of its units, planning, organizing, leading and controlling. The process of reaching organization goals by working with and through people and other organization resources. I hope it's clear now. So what are the basic managerial functions? The first and foremost is planning. Then it is called organizing. Then it is leading. And finally we have what is called controlling. These are the basic managerial functions. In any organization you will find that these four has to exist. So the management process and goal attainment is the intermixing of all these activities. Let us see. Influencing, organizing, planning, controlling. But finally all these four activities are focused to reach organization goals. So you have influencing, you have organizing, you have planning and controlling, but all these things are done to reach organization goals. Management process, the main use of management process is for goal attainment. So what are the resources? Organizational resources, people, money, raw material, capital resources, all these are resources. They go into sub-process, we call it the production process. And finally the output that we get, the finished products in the form of goods or services. In another program in marketing management, we have discussed the differences between goods and services. So what is planning? Planning involves tasks that must be performed to attain organizational goals. These are tasks. Planning involves tasks that must be performed to attain organizational goals. Outlining how the tasks must be performed. It is a document. Basically planning is a document. You think in your mind and then put it down in a piece of paper. As what are the tasks that you need to do and how you are going to do it. So you establish an overall direction for the organization's future. Where do you want the organization to go from five years down the line? Tomorrow what work do you want to do? One year later what work that you want to do? What tasks you want to complete? You identify and commit resources to achieving goals. This part of the planning process for this task, what are the resources that you are going to give in terms of labor, capital? The site, which tasks must be done to reach those goals? Which has to be done first, then what? What are the priorities that you want to set? So you see the steps in planning. Being aware of opportunities. This is a very very interesting phenomenon. You need to be aware of what opportunities are there and then you plan accordingly. You start establishing objectives. You develop premises internal or external. You determine alternative courses. Then you evaluate all the courses. Then you select a course. Well, this is good for the organization. And then finally you formulate some plans and you give numbers to those plans. That this plan is plan A, plan B, plan C and then you work accordingly. So what is organizing? Organizing means assigning the plan task to various individuals or groups within the organization and creating a mechanism to put plans into action. So you have a boss, you'll allocate work for the boss. Then you have subordinates. For different subordinates, you'll have different tasks to be done. So you allocate those work to each and every individual of the organization. Then you create the organization. What is the process? The process of deciding where decisions will be made? Who will perform what jobs and tasks? And who will report to whom in the company? It includes creating departments and job descriptions. The next important principle is stuffing. What do you mean by stuffing? Stuffing means identifying workforce requirement, inventing of people available. You want to keep the knowledge of where you want and where you're going to get the people that you want for your organization. Then you start recruiting them. Recruiting them means getting them into your organization. Then selecting them, selecting the right person for the right job. Then you place them, place them at the right place so that they can deliver what they have come for. Promotion, promoting, giving them promotions, appraising, trying to find out how good they are, whether they are suited for the job. You're planning their career as you see from where they're going to enter at what level and where they're going to achieve in some years time or some time period. You compensate them for the work that they do and then training and development. You see to it that the people that are in the organization are given the right amount of training or skills to do what they want to do in the organization. So training and development starting from identifying the workforce, going through all this process and finally also looking at their well-being as a part of the stuffing process. Another very important principle in management is leading. Leading is a process of influencing people so that they will contribute to organization and group goals. It means guiding the activities of the organization, members in appropriate directions. Objective is to improve the productivity of the organization. So you see there are many factors that is involved in the management. The human factor in management, the multiplicity of roles. No individual person has a single role. He has multiplicity of roles to play in the organization. There is no average person. These are topics in itself which needs to be highlighted and discussed. We may at a later time come back and discuss these concepts of human factors in managing. Importance of a personal dignity considering the whole person. So what is controlling? Controlling is the establishment of standards or yardsticks. This is a very important concept. You establish standards or yardsticks first and then you measure the present performance to pre-establish standards. For example, a work should take 15 minutes of time and then you measure how long this completion of a specific work took place. It is say about 17 minutes. So you can have a kind of an idea that the work that should have been completed in 15 minutes is now taking 17 minutes. So what is to be done? First, you have established a standard that the work should be done in 15 minutes. Then you measure and you found out that the work took about 17 minutes. And finally, correction of deviations through modifications. To meet pre-established standards, what are the corrections that you need to do to get the work done in 15 minutes from 17 minutes? So this is a controlling process. Finally, we come to a concept called budgeting. Budget actually is a controlling technique. It's a formulation of plans for future period in numerical terms. Everything is given a numerical value. Statements of anticipated results in financial terms, capital expenditure, budget, cash budget. These are all statements. These are all control techniques. Statements in non-financial terms. For example, direct labor hours, materials, physical sales volume, production. These are all control techniques, which we call it as budgeting techniques. There are some problems in having these kind of budgets. It could be over budgeting. You put more something which requires less. Overriding enterprise goals. You might feel that the process of budgeting in itself creates rigidity. So you feel that giving the budget more importance than to getting organization goals. You may tend to hide inefficiency and it could become very inflexible. The process of budgeting, putting it in straight terms could make it very inflexible. Then what is the levels of management? See, when you look at management, there are different kind of work that has to be done at different levels of work. If you look at the organization structure, there's a boss, then there are some middle managers, then there will be what you call first line managers. This concept is called levels of management. At the bottom level, you might find people who are non-managers. They only do some work, execution. So first line managers, what is the role of the first line manager? They have direct responsibility for producing goods or services. There are foremen, supervisors, clerical supervisors. Middle managers, they coordinate the employee activities. Top managers, however, provide overall direction of an organization. The chief executive officer, president or vice president. So the first line managers directly responsible for production of goods or services. Employees who report to first line managers do the organization's work. Spend little time with top managers and large organizations. Technical expertise is important. Middle level managers, they are responsible for setting objectives that are consistent with top management goals. They are responsible for coordinating activities. They establish target dates and they need to coordinate with others for the resources. They have the ability to develop others is important. They rely on communication, teamwork and planning and administration competencies to achieve these goals. Top level managers are responsible for providing the overall direction of the organization. You develop organizations and strategies for the entire organization. You spend most of your time planning and leading. So you look at this diagram. This could be the competencies that are required for managers at different levels. Top management requires more conceptual skills and human skills. Technical skills are very, very less. But middle management, they need all the three in maybe in equal terms. Technical skills, human skills and conceptual skills. But supervised or operational management needs more on technical skills and less on human skills and very less, very little on conceptual skills. So finally, we come to a critical manager function which we call communication. In all these activities in the management, a thread goes through the whole organization and that is called the communication process. Communication is a transfer of information from sender to receiver with the information being understood by the receiver. Not only sending, the receiver must get the information and also understand. It is essential for functioning of organizations as it helps in integrating managerial functions. It integrates all the functions, planning, organizing, staffing, recruiting. All activities are actually integrated with the process of communication. It helps in establishing and disseminating organization goals. It helps in developing achievable goals and it helps in the organizing resources. It helps in the appraisal process and most important, it is a critical component in leading, directing and motivating. Leading, directing and motivating is a topic in itself which requires further studies. It is a critical component in the control of performance. Performance by itself is again another topic. So dear learners, today we just came across some specifics introduction to the concept of management. In our later presentations, we will come deeper into these topics of leading, directing, motivating and such other topics. Thank you very much.