Question “The manager of tomorrow will not be a bigger man than his father was before him”. In the light of this statement, discuss the tasks expected to be performed by future managers to effectively deal with management challenges.
ANSWER :
We can summarize by saying that the new demands require that the manager of tomorrow acquaint himself of seven new tasks:
1. He must manage by objectives
2. He must take more risks for a longer period ahead and risk taking decisions. Decisions will have to be made at lower levels in the organization. The manager must therefore be able to calculate each risk, choose the most advantageous risk alternative to establish in advance what he expects to happen and to control subsequent course of action as events bear out or deny his expectations.
3. He must be able to make strategic decisions.
4. He must be able to build an integrated team, each member of which achieves result in relation to the common objectives. And there is a big task ahead in developing managers equal to the demands of tomorrow.
5. He will have to be able to communicate information fast and clearly. He will have to be able to motivate people. He must, in other words, be able to obtain the responsible participation of other managers of the professional specialists and all other workers.
6. Traditionally a manager has been expected to know one or more functions. This will no longer be enough. The manager of tomorrow must be able to see the business as a whole and to integrate his function with it.
7. Traditionally a manager has been expected to know a few products of one industry. This, too, will no longer be enough. The manager of tomorrow will have to be able to relate his product and industry to the total environment, to find what is significant in it and to take it into account in his decisions and actions. And increasingly the field of vision of tomorrow’s manager will have to take in development outside his own market and his own country. Increasingly he will have to learn to see economic, political and social developments on a world-scale and to integrate world wide trends into his own decisions.
But No New Man:
But there will be no new men to do these staggering tasks. The manager of tomorrow will not be a bigger man than his father was before him. He will be possessed of the same endowments, beset by the same facilities and hedged in by the same limitations. There is no evidence that the human being has altered much in the course of recorded history, certainly none that he has grown in intellectual stature or emotional maturity. The Bible is still the fullest measure of man’s nature. Aeschylus and Shakespeare still the best textbooks of psychology and sociology. Socrates and St Thomas Aquinas still the high water marks of human intellect.
How then can we accomplish these new tasks with the same men? There is only one answer: the tasks must be simplified. And there is only one tool for this job: to convert to system and method what has been done before by hunch or intuition to reduce to principles and concepts what has been left to experience and rule of thumb to substitute a logical and cohesive pattern for the chance recognition of elements. Whatever progress the human race has made, whatever ability it has gained to tackle new tasks has been achieved by making things simple through system.
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