Management involves long hours, multiple responsibilities, dealing with conflict and constant stress. There are no general principles which can be applied to all situations in management. There are several contrasting approaches that can be used and will work successfully [sounds like Perl]. The rewards include the excersise of power, good pay and the opportunity to contribute to the organisation.

Change, technology and globalism are three most important challenges that will affect management today and in the near future. Management is defined (Hitt. p8) as "the process of assembling and using sets of resources in a goal-directed manner to accomplish tasks in an organisational setting". Henri Fayol (1841-1925) described management functions as planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Mintzer (1971) characterised management with 'variety, fragmentation and brevity' and outlined interpersonal roles (figurehead, leader, liaison), information roles (monitor, disseminator, spokesperson) and decisional roles (entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, negotiator); not all managers are required to perform all these roles. Steward (1982) identified a set of dimensions which define the job a manager performs (demands, constraints and choices).

Management does not exist without organisations, whether formal or informal, and despite individual characteristics of particular organisations; managers must understand organisations. "Two or more persons engaged in a systematic effort to producte good or services" (Bartol et al 2006) or "A deliberate arrangement of people to accomplish some specific purpose" (Robbins et al 2006) [Hmm.. That's the same thing]. Interesting variations - "An information and decision system" (Druker, 1959.. smacks of sociobiology), "interlocked behaviour centred on specialised task and maintenance activities (Putnam, 1983 Er, no. Full of holes that one..). Stakeholders in an organisation include customers, owners, employees, suppliers, competitors, regulators and ultimately society. A managers job is to ensure satisfaction from all stakeholder units; if any are discontented it will affect (presumably negatively) the operations of the organisation.

Cultural differences will include artifacts ("visible structures and processes"!), espoused values and beliefs and unconscious underlying assumptions (Schein 2004). [What? Have these people done any anthropology?]. Local or individual [sic!] culture is hard to change. A related topic, globalisation, is one of the greatest influences of contemporary times. A fall in relative transport costs has heightened competition between regions. Service-at-a-distance has also been subject to the same pressures. The rise of truly multinational companies have also promoted the rise of globalisation, varying elements of the provision of goods and services in accord to regional comparative advantage.

Management requires getting things done through people and must be adept at assessing the capabilities of others, match responsibilities with those capabilities [ahem! comparative advantage applies!], and must be capable of motivating others. Management requires the ability to master multiple and potentially conflicting situations, requiring the integration of events that occur with temporal and spatial fragmentation, and the development of a finely-tuned sense of organisational and personal heuristics. There is a need for a consistent searching and exploitation of new opportunities, carried out through the functions of planning, organising, directing and controlling.

The skill set of managers begins with a high-level of interpersonal skills (which is retained through middle level and top level), high level of technical skills and a low-level of conceptual skills. As the level of management increases, the level of technical skills and conceptual skills reverse. Managers must also act ethically as the entire system of commercial transactions is founded on a degree of trust; managers should have a clear conscience when engaging their organisational activities.

Any organisation faces the trade-off of being optimised for the present and having the resources to deal with the challenges for tomorrow. This includes the capacity to engage in measurement of operations, speed to market, successful competition for human resources, and by avoiding mistakes.

The earliest theories of management can be found in Plato's Republic [which, I must add, was a tyranny which nobody would actually want to live in]. Sun Tzu's The Art of War is also considered to be an early management text. The emergence of a formal academic discipline is relatively recent, including the works of Frederick Taylor, Henri Fayol and Frank Gilbreth in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taylor is known for "scientific management", the introduction of efficient processes in manufacturing [and championed by Lenin]. Frank and Lillian Gibreth developed this into time and motion studies. New management studies include various practises in quality management, knowledge management, core competencies, a balanced scorecard (developed by Kaplan and Norton, 1992, to include financial and non-financial performance indicators), triple bottom line (environment, society, economic performance), risk management (physical, financial, legal, moral - defined as reputation damage [sic! also check moral hazard]) and six sigma (a statistical approach to ensure that chance outputs are limited to one in a million).