What is management, and how has it changed over the course of the past 100 years? We manage our time, our money and our careers, but in business, management is often confused with supervision, particularly since managers typically are also supervisors. In their text, Management: Competing in the New Era, Thomas Bateman and Scott Snell maintain that management has a direct effect on a company's bottom line--that is, its profit--and that four practices are closely associated with effective management: quality, cost, innovation and speed. Identified in the text by icons, these practices are recurring themes throughout the five sections of the text. The five major areas of the text--foundations of management, planning, organizing, leading and controlling--are broken down into several chapters each, with a total of 18 chapters in the book.
According to the authors, there are four functions of management: planning, organizing, leading and controlling (2002, p. 14). These four functions form the remaining sections of the text. The authors recognize that readers are interested not only in how they can serve the organization, but also in how to manage their careers, and so some attention is given to career management in the first chapter, as well as the overall functions of managers.
Bateman and Snell also recognize that management is influenced by the external environment in which a company or organization operates, and understanding the external environment is given its own chapter. Issues such as how to influence the environment--including through political action--as well as recognizing the difference between the competitive environment and the macroenvironment are also covered. The last chapter in this section addresses the decision making process, including identifying the problem, generating solutions, evaluating alternatives, making the decision, implementing the decision, and evaluating the decision and implementation ...