Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices

Also pub. by Heinemann, London, 1974;Also pub. by Harper, New York, 1974

Table of contents

The alternative to tyranny
The emergence of management
The management boom and its lessons
The new challenges
The dimensions of management
Managing a business: the Sears story
What is a business?
Business purpose and business mission
The power and purpose of objectives: the Marks & Spencer story and its lessons
Strategies, objectives, priorities, and work assignments
Strategic planning: the entrepreneurial skill
The multi-institutional society
Why service institutions do not perform
The exceptions and their lessons
Managing service institutions for performance
The new realities
What we know (and don't know) about work, working, and worker
Making work productive: work and process
Making work productive: controls and tools
Worker and working: theories and reality
Success stories: Japan, Zeiss, IBM
The responsible worker
Employment, incomes, and benefits
"People are our greatest asset"
Management and the quality of life
Social impacts and social problems
The limits of social responsibility
Business and government
Primum non nocere: the ethics of responsibility
Why managers?
What makes a manager?
The manager and his work
Design and content of managerial jobs
Developing management and managers
Management by objectives and self-control
From middle management to knowledge organization
The spirit of performance
The effective decision
Managerial communications
Controls, control, and management
The manager and the management sciences
New needs and new approaches
The building blocks of organization...
...And how they join together
Design logics and design specifications
Work- and task-focused design: functional structure and team
Result-focused design: federal and simulated decentralization
Relations-focused design: the systems structure
Organization conclusions
Georg Siemens and the Deutsche bank
Top-management tasks
Top-management structure
Needed: an effective board
On being the right size
Managing the small, the fair-sized, the big business
On being the wrong size
The pressures for diversity
Building unity out of diversity
Managing diversity
The multinational corporation
Managing growth
The innovative organization
Conclusion: the legitimacy of management

The emergence of management in this century may have been a pivotal event in history. It signaled a major transformation of society into a pluralist society of institutions, of which managements are the effective organs. Management, after more than a century of development as a practice and as a discipline, burst into public consciousness in the management boom that began after World War II and lasted through the 1960s. What has the boom accomplished? What have we learned? And what are the new knowledge we need, the new challenges we face, the new tasks ahead, now that the management boom is over?