KNOWLEDGE INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, SALEM 637504

DEPARTMENT OF ECE
MG8591 – PRINCIPLES OF MANAGEMENT
Content Beyond Syllabus

The Purpose of Management

The purpose of management is to serve customers. Yet, if one looks through most management books
for a definition of management, 99.9 percent of the time the word customer will not be mentioned. This
is astonishing because serving customers in order to obtain a profit is the crux of every business
organization. Equally remiss is the fact that most definitions of management neatly filter out service in
their descriptions of management.

Good managers constantly streamline their organizations toward making a sale. In other words, good
managers are needed to keep their organizations on track by ensuring that everything that’s being done
is ethically geared toward providing what customers want. In this regard, a good manager is responsible
for reducing waste and ambiguity, keeping costs down, and motivating others to do the same. In the
same vein, good managers regularly take educated risks and exercise good judgement (the basis of
entrepreneurship). These risks include:

The Need for Management: Management is needed in order to coordinate the activities of a business
and make sure all employees are working together toward the accomplishment of the organization’s
goals.
 Trying new things;
 Successfully adjusting to constant change;
 Developing subordinates (good managers aren’t afraid of letting other people shine and, in fact,
they encourage it);
 Improving their own skills.
 The Need for Management

Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to
accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively. Since
organizations can be viewed as systems, management can also be defined as human action (including
design) to facilitate the production of useful outcomes from a system. Therefore, management is needed
in order to facilitate a coordinated effort toward the accomplishment of the organization’s goals.

Since most managers are responsible for more work than one person can normally perform, a good
manager delegates and integrates his or her work (or the work of others). A manager does this by acting
as a clear channel of communication within the business that he or she serves. Good management is
needed to inject motivation, creativity, discipline, and enthusiasm into areas in which they either don’t
exist or they’re not necessarily wanted.

The various functions of management are classified as:

 Planning
 Organizing
 Staffing
 Leading/Directing
 Controlling/Monitoring
 Motivation

Management is also responsible for the formation and implementation of business policies and
strategies.

Trends in Management

Modern trends in management favor agile, iterative processes that focus on innovation, software
development, and social impacts.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Understand the evolving nature of management perspectives and strategies

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Key Points

 Management is a constantly evolving field, with a wide variety of formal and informal approaches
and perspectives.
 While new management perspectives are emerging everyday in manufacturing, technology,
software, and social entrepreneurship, some of the most notable new perspectives are in software
development.
 Scrum and agile management styles focus primarily on iteration and the capacity to build non-
hierarchical work structures that empower growth and innovation without the rigidity of
traditional management.
 Social entrepreneurship is a recent emergence in management, in which entrepreneurial
management styles are being taken to the non- profit and community development sectors.
Key Terms

 iteration: The process of repeating a process in pursuit of incremental improvement.

 Scrum: A management philosophy predicated upon a feedback-driven iterative evolution of
process.

Management is a rapidly evolving field. Even now startups all over the world are trying out new,
innovative ways of looking at how to align their resources, how to make decisions, and what managerial
approaches (or lack of managerial approaches) might yield the best culture for growth. It’s an intriguing
time for management, and experimentation is constant.

When looking at new management approaches, it’s useful to consider the area in which these
organizations operate. Software, non-profit, and entrepreneurship are all seeing substantial deviations
from standard corporate management approaches.

Software

The two big words in software management over the past decade or two have been Scrum and Agile.
Each of these approaches is a management philosophy equipped for rapid construction, iteration, and
implementation.

Iterative Development: The agile management philosophy is an adaptation of iterative management.

The concept is fairly simple. All production of new and innovative products and services will require
constant refinement and improvement through iterative experimentation.

Scrum has been around since the late 1980s, but not particularly prevalent until the early 21st century.
Scrum is defined as a feedback-driven empirical approach that highlights transparency, inspection, and
adaptation. In terms of values, scrum discards traditional hierarchy and promotes commitment, courage,
focus, openness, and respect in a team -oriented, objectives-driven environment. In terms of structure,
you’ll find three groups:

Development Team – This will be your functional specialists, all collaborating on a daily basis to
construct a facet (or perhaps the entirety) of a new piece of software. In scrum, this is quite often cross-
functional.

Scrum Master – A facilitator, this individual focuses on removing impediments and acting as a buffer
between the team and external distractions (usually integration with other teams). The scrum master will
also assess progress holistically, and ensure alignment with the scrum mentality.

Product Owner (PO) – The PO focuses on being a voice of the customer and the representation of
stakeholders in the team environment. Stakeholders, in this context, represent anyone with an interest in
the output of that team (primarily organizational owners and other teams). The PO is not a manager, but
instead a bridge between the team and the external environment they operate in.

Scrum Framework: This is an excellent illustration of how scrum mentality works. It is intrinsically a
horizontal management style, meaning there is no particular managerial presence. The idea is the that
the process itself is self-sustaining in pursuit of agreed upon objectives via an iterative cycle of
production.

Social Entrepreneurship

Utilizing the ever-evolving perspectives of start up companies and entrepreneurs, non-profit

organizations and other community-oriented groups have begun replacing traditional management
approaches with a more grassroots perspective. A key metric to a social entrepreneur isn’t profit but
community impact, usually in areas such as poverty alleviation, health care, education, and community
development. This management style is small, focused, innovation-driven, and non-hierarchical.