MEANING:

Management in all business and human organization activity is simply the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives. Management comprises planning, organizing, staffing, leading or directing, and controlling an organization (a group of one or more people or entities) or effort for the purpose of accomplishing a goal. Resourcing encompasses the deployment and manipulation of human resources, financial resources, technological resources, and natural resources.

The Four Management Functions:

PLANNING:

Planning is the first tool of the four functions in the management process. The difference between a successful and unsuccessful manager lies within the planning procedure. Planning is the logical thinking through goals and making the decision as to what needs to be accomplished in order to reach the organizations’ objectives. Managers use this process to plan for the future, like a blueprint to foresee problems, decide on the actions to evade difficult issues and to beat the competition. (Bateman, Snell, 2007).

Planning is the first step in management and is essential as it facilitates control, valuable in decision making and in the avoidance of business ruin.Wyeth has a global vision to lead the way to better health. Employees at Wyeth are committed to excellence and through Wyeth’ s clearly written Mission and Vision Statement, Wyeth must live by its values which clarify the company’s objectives and goals. Quality in the results that are achieved and how the results are reached doing what is right, respect for others, value those that lead and take pride in all they do, and the value of teamwork to reach common goals.

The continuous use of a plan is imperative as Wyeth has divisions throughout the world. Planning allows Wyeth to be at the top of the pharmaceutical industry and a healthcare leader.

ORGANIZING:

In order to reach the objective outlined in the planning process, structuring the work of the organization is a vital concern. Organization is a matter of appointing individuals to assignments or responsibilities that blend together to develop one purpose, to accomplish the goals. These goals will be reached in accordance with the company’s values and procedures. A manager must know their subordinates and what they are capable of in order to organize the most valuable resources a company has, its employees. (Bateman, Snell, 2007). This is achieved through management staffing the work division, setting up the training for the employees, acquiring resources, and organizing the work group into a productive team.

The manager must then go over the plans with the team, break the assignments into units that one person can complete, link related jobs together in an understandable well-organized style and appoint the jobs to individuals. (Allen, G., 1998).Organization is strong at Wyeth with the ability to be flexible, except change and search for new products, Wyeth’ s leadership provides needed direction for staff to achieve personal success that leads to organizational success. Managers at Wyeth are responsible for keeping communication lines open between departments to eliminate any issues from forming. Wyeth would not be a healthcare leader if there was little or no organization.

LEADING:

Organizational success is determined by the quality of leadership that is exhibited. "A leader can be a manager, but a manager is not necessarily a leader," says Gemmy Allen (1998). Leadership is the power of persuasion of one person over others to inspire actions towards achieving the goals of the company. Those in the leadership role must be able to influence/motivate workers to an elevated goal and direct themselves to the duties or responsibilities assigned during the planning process. (Allen, G., 1998). Leadership involves the interpersonal characteristic of a manager's position that includes communication and close contact with team members. (Bateman, Snell, 2007).

Managers at Wyeth are there to motivate workers to fulfill the goals of the company and out-perform their competitors. They as leaders have day to day contact with workers using open communication and are able to give direction individually as well as within teams, departments and divisions. Management is there to inspire subordinates to ‘step up to the plate’ and find innovative means to solve department problems. Authorizing staff to have the capability to deal with situations is a significant part of leading. (Allen, G., 1998).

CONTROLLING:

The process that guarantees plans are being implemented properly is the controlling process. Gemmy Allen stated that ‘Controlling is the final link in the functional chain of management activities and brings the functions of management cycle full circle.’ This allows for the performance standard within the group to be set and communicated. Control allows for ease of delegating tasks to team members and as managers may be held accountable for the performance of subordinates, they may be wise to extend timely feedback of employee accomplishments. (Allen, G., 1998).

Department meetings are daily at Wyeth. Meetings are used to review the daily schedule, prevent problems and to ascertain when problems do exist in order to address and solve those that occur as quickly and as efficiently as possible. Control is the process through which standards for performance of people and processes are set, communicated, and applied. (Allen, G., 1998). Controls are placed on Wyeth employees by requiring the completion of daily responsibilities and adherence to Wyeth’s SOP’s and guidelines, by possibly taking disciplinary action when necessary. Managers and supervisors are given work performance evaluations that are a form of control as it connects performance assessments to rewards and corrective actions. Evaluating employees is a continual process that takes place regularly within the company. (Allen, G., 1998).

MANAGEMENT SKILLS & METHODS:

Principles of management are often given a hard time and often rightly so. Buying into particular methods of management can allow bad managers to hide behind rules and can restrain good managers.

The fashion for adopting particular 'management speak' and protocol is perhaps seen as a typically outdated, yuppie practice, but in reality many workplaces have set rules for how project and tasks are carried out. You may find that your company does not like to 'publicise' their management skills and methods but you would still be wise to pick up on any unspoken techniques in order to succeed in the job.

Spoken or Unspoken Rules If your organisation is one which is happy to make their management skills and methods public, it is likely that you will be able to understand and adopt the skills as required. These may be relatively simple practices such as keeping an up to date 'to do' list or on-line diary for other colleagues to consult. Large corporations or Asia Pacific based organisations may also be keen for their staff to adopt particular skills and methods that may involve more 'dedication', such as certain ways of replying to emails, particular relaxation or social rules and set ways to hold meetings.

There are also internationally recognised management principles that are either established by the company, such as the Toyota Method, or global standards that are adopted, such as the Six Sigma principle or (Total Quality Management TQM). Many companies are keen to gain the world recognised ISO set of standards, which you will be expected to adhere to.

Some members of staff feel supported by such methods and others can feel suffocated by them. If you feel strongly either way it would be worth your while asking about the company's particular belief in set management principles at interview and decide accordingly depending on your views. If you join a company who are strong advocates of a strict management principle and you know that you feel more at home in a fluid structure, the role will not be a success.

Better For the Team and For You Management methods also relate to the individual. Certain working practices can help us in our day to day working lives. If you are able to understand what your trigger points are for motivation and procrastination, you are well on the way to being able to change that behaviour and increase productivity.

Indeed, increasing productivity is essentially what all management principles are founded upon. Finding ways in which their workforce can be more effective, less likely to leave and more likely to increase profits is what it's all about.

Ways in which you are able to effectively manage your own time to improve your productivity include -

#Set aside time to deal with your emails each morning, but do not be distracted by constantly checking your inbox.

#Return phone calls efficiently.

#Utilise the support system in your office.

#Do not be overwhelmed by your 'to do' list - break it down into what is urgent, required or can wait.

Stay on top of project developments so you don't waste time when details change. As a manager, you may find that effective people management skills allow you to get the best from your team without acting in a way that you are not comfortable. Providing regular, honest appraisals with the potential for pay rises, greater responsibility and a realistic plan for the following year are what helps staff feel valued.

They also need to feel like their contribution to the team is noticed and that their work is properly rewarded. There is nothing more frustrating than being told what a great job you are doing, how they couldn't work without you and so on without a pay rise or promotion being in sight.

STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT:

Strategic or institutional management is the conduct of drafting, implementing and evaluating cross-functional decisions that will enable an organization to achieve its long-term objectives. It is the process of specifying the organization's mission, vision and objectives, developing policies and plans, often in terms of projects and programs, which are designed to achieve these objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the policies and plans, projects and programs. A balanced scorecard is often used to evaluate the overall performance of the business and its progress towards objectives

“Strategic management is an ongoing process that evaluates and controls the business and the industries in which the company is involved; assesses its competitors and sets goals and strategies to meet all existing and potential competitors; and then reassesses each strategy annually or quarterly [i.e. regularly] to determine how it has been implemented and whether it has succeeded or needs replacement by a new strategy to meet changed circumstances, new technology, new competitors, a new economic environment., or a new social, financial, or political environment.”

STRATEGY EVALUATION:

Measuring the effectiveness of the organizational strategy, it's extremely important to conduct a SWOT analysis to figure out the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (both internal and external) of the entity in question. This may require to take certain precautionary measures or even to change the entire strategy.

In corporate strategy, Johnson and Scholes present a model in which strategic options are evaluated against three key success criteria:

Suitability (would it work?)

Feasibility (can it be made to work?)

Acceptability (will they work it?)

SUITABILITY:

Suitability deals with the overall rationale of the strategy. The key point to consider is whether the strategy would address the key strategic issues underlined by the organisation's strategic position.

Does it make economic sense?

Would the organisation obtain economies of scale, economies of scope or experience economy?

Would it be suitable in terms of environment and capabilities?

Tools that can be used to evaluate suitability include:

Ranking strategic options

Decision trees

What-if analysis

FEASIBILITY:

Feasibility is concerned with the resources required to implement the strategy are available, can be developed or obtained. Resources include funding, people, time and information.

Tools that can be used to evaluate feasibility include:

cash flow analysis and forecasting

break-even analysis

resource deployment analysis

ACCEPTABILITY:

Acceptability is concerned with the expectations of the identified stakeholders (mainly shareholders, employees and customers) with the expected performance outcomes, which can be return, risk and stakeholder reactions.

Return deals with the benefits expected by the stakeholders (financial and non-financial). For example, shareholders would expect the increase of their wealth, employees would expect improvement in their careers and customers would expect better value for money.
Risk deals with the probability and consequences of failure of a strategy (financial and non-financial).

Stakeholder reactions deals with anticipating the likely reaction of stakeholders. Shareholders could oppose the issuing of new shares, employees and unions could oppose outsourcing for fear of losing their jobs, customers could have concerns over a merger with regards to quality and support.

Tools that can be used to evaluate acceptability include:

what-if analysis

stakeholder mapping

THE PSYCHOLOGY OFSTRATEGY MANAGEMENT:

Several psychologists have conducted studies to determine the psychological patterns involved in strategic management. Typically senior managers have been asked how they go about making strategic decisions. A 1938 treatise by Chester Barnard, that was based on his own experience as a business executive, sees the process as informal, intuitive, non-routinized, and involving primarily oral, 2-way communications. Bernard says “The process is the sensing of the organization as a whole and the total situation relevant to it. It transcends the capacity of merely intellectual methods, and the techniques of discriminating the factors of the situation.

The terms pertinent to it are “feeling”, “judgement”, “sense”, “proportion”, “balance”, “appropriateness”. It is a matter of art rather than science."

In 1973, Henry Mintzberg found that senior managers typically deal with unpredictable situations so they strategize in ad hoc, flexible, dynamic, and implicit ways. He says, “The job breeds adaptive information-manipulators who prefer the live concrete situation. The manager works in an environment of stimulous-response, and he develops in his work a clear preference for live action."

In 1982, John Kotter studied the daily activities of 15 executives and concluded that they spent most of their time developing and working a network of relationships from which they gained general insights and specific details to be used in making strategic decisions. They tended to use “mental road maps” rather than systematic planning techniques.

Daniel Isenberg's 1984 study of senior managers found that their decisions were highly intuitive. Executives often sensed what they were going to do before they could explain why. He claimed in 1986 that one of the reasons for this is the complexity of strategic decisions and the resultant information uncertainty.

Shoshana Zuboff (1988) claims that information technology is widening the divide between senior managers (who typically make strategic decisions) and operational level managers (who typically make routine decisions). She claims that prior to the widespread use of computer systems, managers, even at the most senior level, engaged in both strategic decisions and routine administration, but as computers facilitated (She called it “deskilled”) routine processes, these activities were moved further down the hierarchy, leaving senior management free for strategic decions making.

In 1977, Abraham Zaleznik identified a difference between leaders and managers. He describes leadershipleaders as visionaries who inspire. They care about substance. Whereas managers are claimed to care about process, plans, and form. He also claimed in 1989 that the rise of the manager was the main factor that caused the decline of American business in the 1970s and 80s. Lack of leadership is most damaging at the level of strategic management where it can paralyze an entire organization.

According to Corner, Kinichi, and Keats, strategic decision making in organizations occurs at two levels: individual and aggregate. They have developed a model of parallel strategic decision making. The model identifies two parallel processes both of which involve getting attention, encoding information, storage and retrieval of information, strategic choice, strategic outcome, and feedback. The individual and organizational processes are not independent however. They interact at each stage of the process.

LIMITATION OF STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT:

Although a sense of direction is important, it can also stifle creativity, especially if it is rigidly enforced. In an uncertain and ambiguous world, fluidity can be more important than a finely tuned strategic compass. When a strategy becomes internalized into a corporate culture, it can lead to group think. It can also cause an organization to define itself too narrowly. An example of this is marketing myopia.

Many theories of strategic management tend to undergo only brief periods of popularity. A summary of these theories thus inevitably exhibits survivorship bias (itself an area of research in strategic management). Many theories tend either to be too narrow in focus to build a complete corporate strategy on, or too general and abstract to be applicable to specific situations. Populism or faddishness can have an impact on a particular theory's life cycle and may see application in inappropriate circumstances. See business philosophies and popular management theories for a more critical view of management theories.

In 2000, Gary Hamel coined the term strategic convergence to explain the limited scope of the strategies being used by rivals in greatly differing circumstances. He lamented that strategies converge more than they should, because the more successful ones are imitated by firms that do not understand that the strategic process involves designing a custom strategy for the specifics of each situation.Ram Charan, aligning with a popular marketing tagline, believes that strategic planning must not dominate action. "Just do it!", while not quite what he meant, is a phrase that nevertheless comes to mind when combatting analysis paralysis.

THE LINEARITY TAP:

It is tempting to think that the elements of strategic management –

(i) reaching consensus on corporate objectives;

(ii) developing a plan for achieving the objectives; and

(iii) marshalling and allocating the resources required to implement the plan – can be approached sequentially. It would be convenient, in other words, if one could deal first with the noble question of ends, and then address the mundane question of means.

But in the world in which strategies have to be implemented, the three elements are interdependent. Means are as likely to determine ends as ends are to determine means. The objectives that an organization might wish to pursue are limited by the range of feasible approaches to implementation. (There will usually be only a small number of approaches that will not only be technically and administratively possible, but also satisfactory to the full range of organizational stakeholders.) In turn, the range of feasible implementation approaches is determined by the availability of resources.

And so, although participants in a typical “strategy session” may be asked to do “blue sky” thinking where they pretend that the usual constraints – resources, acceptability to stakeholders , administrative feasibility – have been lifted, the fact is that it rarely makes sense to divorce oneself from the environment in which a strategy will have to be implemented. It’s probably impossible to think in any meaningful way about strategy in an unconstrained environment.

Our brains can’t process “boundless possibilities”, and the very idea of strategy only has meaning in the context of challenges or obstacles to be overcome. It’s at least as plausible to argue that acute awareness of constraints is the very thing that stimulates creativity by forcing us to constantly reassess both means and ends in light of circumstances.

The key question, then, is, "How can individuals, organizations and societies cope as well as possible with ... issues too complex to be fully understood, given the fact that actions initiated on the basis of inadequate understanding may lead to significant regret

The answer is that the process of developing organizational strategy must be iterative. It involves toggling back and forth between questions about objectives, implementation planning and resources. An initial idea about corporate objectives may have to be altered if there is no feasible implementation plan that will meet with a sufficient level of acceptance among the full range of stakeholders, or because the necessary resources are not available, or both.
Even the most talented manager would no doubt agree that "comprehensive analysis is impossible" for complex problems.

Formulation and implementation of strategy must thus occur side-by-side rather than sequentially, because strategies are built on assumptions which, in the absence of perfect knowledge, will never be perfectly correct. Strategic management is necessarily a "repetitive learning cycle [rather than] a linear progression towards a clearly defined final destination."While assumptions can and should be tested in advance, the ultimate test is implementation. You will inevitably need to adjust corporate objectives and/or your approach to pursuing outcomes and/or assumptions about required resources.

Thus a strategy will get remade during implementation because "humans rarely can proceed satisfactorily except by learning from experience; and modest probes, serially modified on the basis of feedback, usually are the best method for such learning."

It serves little purpose (other than to provide a false aura of certainty sometimes demanded by corporate strategists and planners) to pretend to anticipate every possible consequence of a corporate decision, every possible constraining or enabling factor, and every possible point of view. At the end of the day, what matters for the purposes of strategic management is having a clear view – based on the best available evidence and on defensible assumptions – of what it seems possible to accomplish within the constraints of a given set of circumstances. As the situation changes, some opportunities for pursuing objectives will disappear and others arise. Some implementation approaches will become impossible, while others, previously impossible or unimagined, will become viable.

The essence of being “strategic” thus lies in a capacity for "intelligent trial-and error"rather than linear adherence to finally honed and detailed strategic plans. Strategic management will add little value -- indeed, it may well do harm -- if organizational strategies are designed to be used as a detailed blueprints for managers. Strategy should be seen, rather, as laying out the general path - but not the precise steps - by which an organization intends to create value.

Strategic management is a question of interpreting, and continuously reinterpreting, the possibilities presented by shifting circumstances for advancing an organization's objectives. Doing so requires strategists to think simultaneously about desired objectives, the best approach for achieving them, and the resources implied by the chosen approach. It requires a frame of mind that admits of no boundary between means and ends.