Management

"Since the concentric organization chart has neither top nor bottom, the interpretations of the relationships existing within the organization are not dependent upon the position of the diagram which represents them. Any organization chart is designed to present certain facts about a given organization at given time. These facts or relationships do not depend on viewing the organization from any particular angle or any specific position, which is also the case for the concentric organization chart. However, with the traditional organization chart, the relationships which it intends to portray can be interpreted properly only when the chart is presented to the viewer in a certain position, that is, with the top at the top and the bottom at the bottom. Should this not be done, the organization should be upside down Should this not be done, the organization would be upside down, with relationships existing inversely to the facts of the organizational structure."

"The formal administrative design can never adequately or fully reflect the concrete organization to which it refers, for the obvious reason that no abstract plan or pattern can—or may, if it is to be useful—exhaustively describe an empirical totality. At the same time, that which is not included in the abstract design (as reflected, for example, in a a staff and-line organization chart) is vitally relevant to the maintenance and development of the formal system itself."

"How many people, if asked, could tell you exactly where they fit in, and exactly what their duties, authority, and relationships are with every other member in their organization? If an answer could be given at all, it would require much thought and debate. So, it is difficult to visualize an organization in its entirety, and to clearly picture just where an individual stands in it. Because such difficulties exist for an individual, consider the situation in which top level management finds itself when confronted with the same question. And because necessity is the mother of invention, a tool for management has been invented to enable the manager to quickly locate who is responsible for what, and why. This tool we call the organization chart. It is but one of the tools of management."

"In some firms role relationships prescribed by the chart seemed to be of secondary importance to personal relationships between individuals."

"It is not surprising that the organization chart is a frustrating instrument when used for other purposes, or when the chart is drawn to conform to some executive's ideal rather than to the observable facts of organizational life."

"Delegation is the dynamics of management; it is the process a manager follows in dividing the work assigned to him so that he performs that part which only he, because of his unique organizational placement, can perform effectively, and so that he can get others to help him with what remains. How can he best share his burden? First, he must entrust to others the performance of part of the work he would otherwise have to do himself; secondly, he must provide a means of checking up on the work that is done for him to ensure that it is done as he wishes."

"When a specific desired end is attained we shall say that the action is "effective." When the unsought consequences of the action are more important than the attainment of the desired end and are dissatisfactory, effective action, we shall say, is "inefficient." When the unsought consequences are unimportant or trivial, the action is "efficient."

"Effectiveness relates to the accomplishment of the cooperative purpose which is social and non-personal in character. Efficiency relates to the satisfaction of individual motives and is personal in character."

"Extreme states of being, whether individual or collective, were once purposefully motivated. Some of those purposes no longer have meaning (expiation, salvation). The well-being of communities in so longer sought through means of doubtful effectiveness, but directly, through action. Under these conditions, extreme states of being fell into the domain of the arts, and not without a certain disadvantage. Literature (fiction) took the place of what had formerly been the spiritual life; poetry (the disorder of words) that of real states of trance. Art constituted a small free domain, outside action: to gain freedom it had to renounce the real world. This is a heavy price to pay, and most writers dream of recovering a lost reality. They must then pay in another sense, by renouncing freedom."

"In the past, it was easier to believe in my own effectiveness. If I worked hard, with good colleagues and good ideas, we could make a difference. But now, I sincerely doubt that."

"Besides each one of us working individually, all of us have got to work together. We cannot possibly do our best work as a nation unless all of us know how to act in combination as well as how to act each individually for himself. The acting in combination can take many forms, but of course its most effective form must be when it comes in the shape of law — that is, of action by the community as a whole through the lawmaking body."

"Corporations are necessary to the effective use of the forces of production and commerce under modern conditions. We cannot effectively prohibit all combinations without doing far-reaching economic harm; and it is mere folly to do as we have done in the past—to try to combine incompatible systems—that is, to try both to prohibit and regulate combinations. Combinations in industry are the result of an imperative economic law which cannot be repealed by political legislation. The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed. The only course left is active corporate regulation – that is, the control of corporations for the common good—the suppression of the evils that they work, and the retention, as far as maybe, of that business efficiency in their use which has placed us in the forefront of industrial peoples."

"The effectiveness of the performance will depend on the effectiveness of the play and the effectiveness with which it is played. The effectiveness of the administrative process will vary with the effectiveness of the organization and the effectiveness with which its members play their parts."

"Our words are built on the objects of our experience. They have acquired their effectiveness by adapting themselves to the occurrences of our everyday world."

"The effectiveness to be aimed at calls for the application and refinement of all conceivable prognostic techniques for adding to knowledge of the future, including those which can be effectively developed over an ever-wider time scale."

"Truth is great and its effectiveness endures."

"Previous war-presidents have gathered opponents into their cabinets, reached out to estranged former allies, engaged in aggressive diplomacy to maximize effectiveness and rallied the whole country for the fight."

"Cybernetics insists, also, on a further and rather special condition that distinguishes it from ordinary scientific theorizing: it demands a certain standard of effectiveness."

"It is also very difficult to understand the effectiveness of our actions without measurements."

"The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness ."

"Three principles — the conformability of nature to herself, the applicability of the criterion of simplicity, and the "unreasonable effectiveness" of certain parts of mathematics in describing physical reality — are thus consequences of the underlying law of the elementary particles and their interactions."

"The executive is, first of all, expected to get the right things done. And this is simply saying that he is expected to be effective […] For manual work, we need only efficiency; that is, the ability to do things right rather than the ability to get the right things done. The manual worker can always be judged in terms of the quantity and quality of a definable and discrete output, such as a pair of shoes"

"Effectiveness is doing the things that get you closer to your goals. Efficiency is performing a given task (whether important or not) in the most economical manner possible. Being efficient without regard to effectiveness is the default mode of the universe."

"The ultimate measurement is effectiveness, not efficiency."

"Theatrical effectiveness, I believe, lies in it's rarity its uniqueness"

"Their high expectations for effectiveness were made possible by low expectations of what was to be."

"A business of high principle generates greater drive and effectiveness because people know that they can do the right thing decisively and with confidence."

"It is highly desirable that we have trained persons look at these varied possibilities to compare their effectiveness, and to point the way to sound engineering decisions."

"It is fundamentally the confusion between effectiveness and efficiency that stands between doing the right things and doing things right. There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all."

"Optimum realization aims at a harmonious synthesis of effectiveness and justice in the furthest possible surveyable part of future time."

"Because of his compassion Owen was always in trouble with his partners. They would have much preferred a tough, down-to-earth manager who would get a days work out of the little bastards."

"The greatest problem before engineers and managers today is the economical utilization of labor. The limiting of output by the workman, and the limiting by the employer of the amount a workman is allowed to earn, are both factors which militate against that harmonious co-operation of employer and employee which is essential to their highest common good."

"The key to virtually every management science application is a mathematical model."

"Operations research has many precursors and allied fields, including Taylorism (after Frederick W. Taylor), scientific management and management science, industrial engineering and systems analysis. As one early textbook explained, the roots of OR "are as old as science and the management function. Its name dates back only to 1940" (Churchman et al. 1957: 3). Certainly its practitioners have expended much energy and ink in search of an acceptable definition of OR. Morse tried unsuccessfully to halt the debate by declaring OR to be 'the activity carried on by members of the Operations Research Society' (Morse 1953: 159) But his colleagues were not so easily dissuaded from debate. Much of the concern with definition focused on the sometimes elusive distinctions between OR and neighbouring fields; the attempt to define, or redefine, OR was also born of the desire to allow the subject to evolve beyond the orthodoxy of wartime experience. Crucial considerations included the balance between model and application, and the complexity of the mathematics involved."

"The management science approach to organizational decision making is the analog to the rational approach by individual managers. Management science came into being during World War II. At that time, mathematical and statistical techniques were applied to urgent, large-scale military problems that were beyond the ability of individual decision makers. Mathematicians, physicists, and operations researchers used systems analysis to develop artillery trajectories, antisubmarine strategies, and bombing strategies such as salvoing (discharging multiple shells simultaneously). Consider the problem of a battleship trying to sink an enemy ship several miles away. The calculation for aiming the battleship's guns should consider distance, wind speed, shell size, speed and direction of both ships, pitch and roll of the firing ship, and curvature of the earth. Methods for performing such calculations using trial and error and intuition are not accurate, take far too long, and may never achieve success. This is where management science came in. Analysts were able to identify the relevant variables involved in aiming a ship's guns and could model them with the use of mathematical equations. Distance, speed, pitch, roll, shell size, and so on could be calculated and entered into the equations. The answer was immediate, and the guns could begin firing. Factors such as pitch and roll were soon measured mechanically and fed directly into the targeting mechanism. Today, the human element is completely removed from the targeting process. Radar picks up the target, and the entire sequence is computed automatically."

"The subject of management science has evolved for more than 60 years and is now a mature field within the broad category of applied mathematics. This book will emphasize both the applied and mathematical aspects of management science."

"When discussing management and science, I kept saying to myself over and over again that science could be looked at as a kind of management, or that management could be looked at as a kind of science. Saying that science can become a way of managing didn't imply automation or any other form of mechanical decision making, because none of this is science. Science is the creative discovery of knowledge. Management science is the process of trying to look at science as a management function. Similarly, management can be looked at as a scientific function, that is, as a way of finding out about the world."

"Decision theory can be pursued not only for the purposes of building foundations for political economy, or of understanding and explaining phenomena that are in themselves intrinsically interesting, but also for the purpose of offering direct advice to business and governmental decision makers. For reasons not clear to me, this territory was very sparsely settled prior to World War II. Such inhabitants as it had were mainly industrial engineers, students of public administration, and specialists in business functions, none of whom especially identified themselves with the economic sciences. Prominent pioneers included the mathematician, Charles Babbage, inventor of the digital computer, the engineer, Frederick Taylor and the administrator, Henri Fayol. During World War II, this territory, almost abandoned, was rediscovered by scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians concerned with military management and logistics, and was renamed “operations research” or “operations analysis.” So remote were the operations researchers from the social science community that economists wishing to enter the territory had to establish their own colony, which they called “management science”."

"During and after World War II, a large number of academic economists were exposed directly to business life, and had more or less extensive opportunities to observe how decisions were actually made in business organizations. Moreover, those who became active in the development of the new management science were faced with the necessity of developing decision-making procedures that could actually be applied in practical situations. Surely these trends would be conducive to moving the basic assumptions of economic rationality in the direction of greater realism."

"The aim of management science is to display the best course of action in a given set of circumstances, and this must include all the circumstances."

"The increase of this efficiency is essentially the problem of the manager, and the amount to which it can be increased by proper study is, in most cases, so great as to be almost incredible."

"Now the salient characteristic of the decision tools employed in management science is that they have to be capable of actually making or recommending decisions, taking as their inputs the kinds of empirical data that are available in the real world, and performing only such computations as can reasonably be performed by existing desk calculators or, a little later electronic computers. For these domains, idealized models of optimizing entrepreneurs, equipped with complete certainty about the world - or, a worst, having full probability distributions for uncertain events - are of little use. Models have to be fashioned with an eye to practical computability, no matter how severe the approximations and simplifications that are thereby imposed on them... The first is to retain optimization, but to simplify sufficiently so that the optimum (in the simplified world!) is computable. The second is to construct satisficing models that provide good enough decisions with reasonable costs of computation. By giving up optimization, a richer set of properties of the real world can be retained in the models... Neither approach, in general, dominates the other, and both have continued to co-exist in the world of management science."

"The purpose of management science is to secure improvement in social systems by means of the scientific method."

"Henry R. Towne is unquestionably the pioneer of management science. He began, as early as 1870, the systematic application at the Yale & Towne works, of what are now recognized as efficient management methods. In 1886, his paper "The Engineer as Economist," delivered before the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, probably inspired Frederick W. Taylor, then a young man of twenty, to devote his energies to the labor that formed his life work."

"The last decade has developed new and complex tools for management, in the form of high-speed computational, display, and communication techniques as well as of powerful analytical methods such as information theory, , and . These tools are being applied to continuing industrial problems, such as production and labor force scheduling, inventory control, sales forecast, and data processing (flow of information), as well as to special problems arising in connection with planning, market analysis, and organization. There is a rapidly growing demand for those well trained in the management sciences. Special graduate training in this held may be based on undergraduate study leading to a bachelor's degree in such fields as business administration, engineering, mathematics or the physical sciences, economics, and psychology."

"One cannot help but be struck by the diversity that characterizes efforts to study the management process. If it is true that psychologists like to study personality traits in terms of a person's reactions to objects and events, they could not choose a better stimulus than management science. Some feel it is a technique, some feel it is a branch of mathematics, or of mathematical economics, or of the "behavioral sciences," or of consultation services, or just so much nonsense. Some feel it is for management (vs. labor), some feel it ought to be for the good of mankind — or for the good of underpaid professors."

"In the the past thirty years, what is now known as the science of has grown from a scattered, almost formless beginning into a well-defined, rapidly developing structure. Today this science bids fair to outstrip in public importance and economic usefulness any one of the great sciences that have been applied to serve mankind. For the science of industrial management is the great super-science that takes mechanics, chemistry, physics, electricity, psychology; and Burbank-like, grafts them all into one great, productive, ever-bearing plant."

"A manager's to give advice, not to physically get involved."

"If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy."

"There will be no drastic revolution in management functions or organizations in order to encompass systems management. Rather, the adaptation of systems management theory to organizations has been and will continue to be an evolutionary process."