Managemnt Fom 03

Editor's Notes

• #3: Planning is defining organizational goals, establishing a strategy for reaching those goals, and developing a comprehensive hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate activities. It can be either formal or informal, depending on the time frame and amount of documentation
• #4: Planning may create rigidity. Assuming that conditions will remain relatively stable, formal plans lock organizational units into specific goals and time frames. Plans can’t be developed for a dynamic environment. Managing chaos and turning disasters into opportunities requires flexibility, not rigid, formal plans. Formal plans can’t replace intuition and creativity. Developing strategy depends as much on intuition and creativity as it does on formal analysis. Because most successful strategies are visions, not plans, merely following a systematic framework will not yield incisive thinking. Planning focuses a manager’s attention on today’s competition, not on tomorrow’s survival. Formal planning stresses capitalizing on existing opportunities, not reinventing or creating an industry. Formal planning reinforces success, which may lead to failure. Success can breed failure. Since change is motivated by problems, success may not motivate managers to challenge the status quo.
• #5: The evidence is mostly positive and suggests several conclusions: Formal planning in an organization is frequently associated with positive financial results. In those organizations in which formal planning did not lead to higher performance, the environment was typically the culprit. The quality of the planning process and the implementation of the plans affect performance more than does the extent of the plans.
• #6: The short-term covers less than one year, the intermediate-term covers one to five years, and the long-term is five years or more. The commitment concept is relevant to classifying plans because the more current plans affect future commitments, the longer the time frame for which managers must plan. The length of the planning horizon increases up the management hierarchy and decisions of top management imply greater commitments of resources than decisions of lower managers. With respect to the degree of variability, the greater the uncertainty, the more plans should be of the short-term variety. This is so because shorter-term plans allow for better accommodation of change by providing more flexibility.
• #9: It appears intuitively correct that specific plans are always preferable to directional, or loosely guided plans. Specific plans have clearly defined objectives and leave no room for misinterpretation. However, specific plans are not without drawbacks. They require a clarify and predictability that often does not exist. When uncertainty is high and flexibility is needed, directional plans are preferable. Since directional plans identify general guidelines, they provide focus but do not lock managers into specific objectives or courses of action
• #10: Some plans are meant to be used only once; others are used repeatedly. A single-use plan is used to meet the needs for a particular or unique situation. A standing plan is ongoing and guides for actions that are performed repeatedly in an organization.
• #11: Management by objectives (MBO) emphasizes participation to set goals that are tangible, verifiable, and measurable. MBO’s appeal lies in its emphasis on converting overall organizational objectives into specific objectives for units and members of the organization.
• #12: Employees should understand what they are trying to accomplish. Managers can help employees set work goals by using the following guidelines:
• #13: First, management must identify the mission, objectives, and strategies of the organization. A mission statement defines an organization’s purpose and provides guidance to managers and employees. A clear mission statement forces management to identify the scope of its products or services carefully It answers questions such as the following: What business are we in? What are we trying to accomplish? All organizations have strengths and weaknesses.
• #14: In step two, managers analyze the environment in which the organization operates: actions of competitors, pending government legislation, preferences of customers, and supply of labor. Managers use environmental scanning to anticipate and interpret environmental changes. The term refers to screening information to detect trends, monitor the actions of others, and create scenarios. This slide and the next one review four environmental-scanning techniques: competitive intelligence, scenario development, forecasting, and benchmarking. The seeking of basic information about competitors, competitive intelligence can allow managers to anticipate rather than react to the actions of competitors. Advertisements, promotional materials, press releases, governmental reports, annual reports, want-ads, newspaper articles, databases, trade shows, industry studies, and competitor’s products supply 95% of the data required for this technique to work.
• #15: Management analyzes the internal resources of the organization, such as capital, skills of workers, or patents. These resources are the strengths of the organization. The strengths that represent unique skills or resources are called the organization’s distinctive competence. In contrast, weaknesses are resources that are lacking in the organization. Based on the results of the SWOT analysis, management must complete step six by assessing the opportunities that are available, reevaluating its missions and objectives, and making necessary changes.
• #16: To sustain a competitive advantage, managers create barriers to competition through patents, copyrights, or trademarks; using economies of scale to reduce price to boost volume; locking up suppliers with exclusive contracts and lobbying for government policies to limit foreign competition.
• #17: TQM focuses on quality and continuous improvement. If integrated into ongoing operations, incremental improvement can accumulate into a competitive advantage that others cannot steal. Benchmarking is the practice of using a measurable scale to compare key business operations with those of successful organizations. It involves four steps. (1) Form a team to identify the following: benchmarking targets, “best practices” of other organizations, and data collection methods. (2) Collect data from internal operations and external organizations. (3) Analyze data to identify performance gaps and determine their causes. (4) Prepare and implement an action plan to meet or exceed performance standards. To show that its products meet world standards for quality management, a company must gain ISO 9000 certification. The certificate attests that the company has met rigorous standards for quality and consistency as defined by the International Organization for Standardization in Geneva.
• #18: The six sigma philosophy was developed in the 1980s at Motorola. Its premise is to “design, measure, analyze, and control the input side of a production process.” Rather than measuring the quality of a product after it is produced, six sigma uses statistical models, specific quality tools, high levels of rigor, and process improvement “know how” to design in quality as the product is being made. Accordingly, six sigma is designed to decrease defects to fewer than four per million items produced.