Thoughts on Management

Thoughts on Management

1.  Personal experience

2.  Observation on the practice of management on others

3.  Real management

4.  Ideal management

5.  Teaching philosophy

Management to me refers to the professional handling, caring and nurturing of a particular enterprise or endeavor.  Handling a department peopled with different and contrasting background is a difficult and a complex task.  To have such a privilege, one must be mature intellectually and psychologically.  Departmental politics will inevitably come to fore and one must be above such (ideally).  If one is pushed into such a position unprepared or not yet ready, failure for the organization and maladjustment for the individual is the inevitable outcome.

In the business world, in the sporting world as well as in the academic world, tales have been told where success was achieved because everything was in its proper place and proper time and everything and everyone was doing their assigned role and parts.  Everyone was exceeding expectations; hence excellence was the inevitable outcome.  With great management, great results are to be expected.  When people know their assigned role, when there is a clear definition of expectations, success is destined to happen.

More than anything else, the main task of management is to make its people happy, because from what I observed, the happiest people are the most productive people.  The trick and the challenge now is how to help find and define happiness according to varying expectations and contrasting definitions.  Because some people are content with under achievement.

Battling underachievement however is easy, just provide the exact motivation needed and underachievement is nipped in the bud.  Motivation could vary from sex, money, prestige, power or just a simple recognition and acknowledgement.  Interplay of usage of these motivational cards will pull and push the enterprise and endeavor to success at any given time.

Currently, Google pays the highest in terms of compensation for all employees.  People all over the world want to work for Google because of their generous compensation package where one is not just an employee but a stakeholder and a shareholder as well.  There is a low turnover of employees and why is that?  Because there is lesser restrictions and creativity and innovation is considered as a premium possession.  People are happy and eager to work for Google hence these fortunate are also inevitably the most productive employee.  A simple trick is easy to gauge the productivity of an enterprise.  If there is a tangible high morale, if the people around the enterprise are enjoying themselves, then success and productivity is just around the corner.

Poor management results in low morale for its employees.  When popularity becomes the defining factor instead of doing things right then failure of enterprise is bound to happen sooner or later.

I really do not believe in micro-management, my personal experience points me to the philosophy of finding the talent and letting it prove itself.  Delegation of work but never the delegation of responsibility, besides you really cannot delegate responsibility.

Since I am an academic, there really must be a bedrock of teaching style or teaching philosophy.  I subscribe to the Latin phrase of “monere et delectere”.  The literal translation is “to illuminate and to delight”.  For a decade now, illuminating and delighting students have been my main purpose and aim in instruction.  I believe that students must enjoy the instruction process itself, because excellence is never attained it they are unable to enjoy the process of acquiring knowledge.