Module 1 Overview.docx - Module 1 Overview Whatu2019s in...

Module 1 Overview
What’s in It for Me?
Reading this chapter will help you do the following:
1. Learn who managers are and about the nature of their work.
2. Know why you should care about leadership, entrepreneurship, and
strategy.
3. Know the dimensions of the planning-organizing-leading-controlling (P-
O-L-C) framework.
4. Learn how economic performance feeds social and environmental
performance.
5. Understand what performance means at the individual and group
levels.
6. Create your survivor’s guide to learning and developing principles of
management.
We’re betting that you already have a lot of experience with organizations,
teams, and leadership. You’ve been through schools, in clubs, participated in
social or religious groups, competed in sports or games, or taken on full- or
part-time jobs. Some of your experience was probably pretty positive, but
you were also likely wondering sometimes, “Isn’t there a better way to do
this?”
After participating in this course, we hope that you find the answer to be
“Yes!” While management is both art and science, with our help you can
identify and develop the skills essential to better managing your and others’
behaviors where organizations are concerned.
Before getting ahead of ourselves, just what is management, let alone
principles of management? A manager’s primary challenge is to solve
problems creatively, and you should view management as “the art of getting

things done through the efforts of other people.” Follett was an American
social worker, consultant, and author of books on democracy, human
relations, and management. She worked as a management and political
theorist, introducing such phrases as “conflict resolution,” “authority and
power,” and “the task of leadership.” The principles of management, then,
are the means by which you actually manage, that is, get things done
through others—individually, in groups, or in organizations. Formally defined,
the principles of management are the activities that “plan, organize, and
control the operations of the basic elements of [people], materials,
machines, methods, money and markets, providing direction and
coordination, and giving leadership to human efforts, so as to achieve the
sought objectives of the enterprise.”The fundamental notion of principles of
management was developed by French management theorist Henri Fayol
(1841–1925). He is credited with the original planning-organizing-leading-
controlling framework (P-O-L-C), which, while undergoing very important
changes in content, remains the dominant management framework in the
world. For this reason, principles of management are often discussed or
learned using a framework called P-O-L-C, which stands for planning,
organizing, leading, and controlling.