Questions and Answers of Essentials Of Management

What are the major social responsibilities of business managers? Of public administrators? Have these responsibilities changed over the years? How?
If you were the chief executive of a large corporation, how would you institutionalize ethics in the organization?
What ethical codes would you recommend for your university, your class, and your family? How should these codes be enforced?
Consider an organization that you have worked for in the past. Discuss two or three aspects of the external environment that impacted that organization for better or worse.
Consider an ethical dilemma you faced in the past. How did you address it then? What would you do differently today?
Revisit your LinkedIn Profile. Ensure each organization you worked for is listed along with three to four bullet points of achievements you made with each organization.
Search the Internet for “business ethics” and select two articles for class discussion.
Cars do pollute the air. Search the Internet for “ecology”and “cars” to find out what car makers are doing to reduce pollution.
Search the Internet for “knowledge age” and describe three developments that might affect you or provide opportunities for you.
What is Theory Z?
Do you think the managerial concepts and practices applied in the United States can be transferred to Britain, France, Germany, or any other country that you know?
Take any country which you are familiar with and discuss how factors in the educational environment impact on managing an enterprise.
Discuss how a company with a geocentric orientation may manage. Compare these practices with a company having an ethnocentric outlook.
Do you think that the way managerial decisions are made in Japan could work in the United States? Why or why not?
From the various approaches to quality management, which model do you find most useful? Why?
Search the Internet for Geert Hofstede and identify his articles and books. Discuss the cultural characteristics of any three countries.
Use the Internet to find out the economic conditions of the Eastern European countries that have been admitted to the European Union. Select one country to discuss in detail.
“Planning is looking ahead, and control is looking back.”Comment.
Draw up a statement of policy and devise a brief procedure that might be useful in implementing it. Are you sure your policy is not a rule?
Take an organization that you know and identify its purpose or mission, even if it is not formally stated by the enterprise.
To what extent do you believe that managers you have known in business or elsewhere have a clear understanding of their objectives? If you think they do not, how would you suggest that they go about
Some people object to defining long-term goals because they think that knowing what will happen over a long period is impossible. Do you believe this is an intelligent position to take? Why or why
Do you think that managing by objectives could be introduced in a government agency? A university? A college fraternity or sorority?
What are your five most important personal objectives? Are they long or short range? Are the objectives verifiable?
In your organization, what does your manager expect from you in terms of performance? Is it stated in writing? If you wrote down your job objective and your boss wrote down what he or she expects of
How can MBO be applied to a new venture? Give an example.
Which company does a better job at managing by objective: Facebook or Google? Explain your position.Which company will be more successful in the next five years? Why?
Use a search engine to look for “management by objectives” and identify how MBO is used: as a planning tool? For managerial appraisal? For motivating people? In conjunction with strategic
Search the Internet for the term “budget” and discuss your findings with the class.
How can you distinguish between strategies and policies?
Are strategies and policies as important in a nonbusiness enterprise (such as a labor union, a government department, a hospital, or a city fire department) as they are in a business? Why and how?
Why are contingency plans important?
Choose an organization that you know and identify its strengths and weaknesses. What are its special opportunities and threats in the external environment?
How would you make an organizational appraisal of your college or university? What kind of “business” is the school in?
How can strategies be implemented effectively?
Identify major premises that, in your judgment, Honda Motor Company would need in order to forecast its sales of automobiles for the next two years.
Read two articles that deal with strategy in magazines such as Fortune or Business Week. List the strengths and weaknesses of a company reported as well as the opportunities and threats faced by the
Take a major decision problem facing you and outline the more critical planning premises surrounding it. How many of these are matters of knowledge and how many matters of forecast? How many are
Update your LinkedIn Profile and follow the companies that you find interesting.
The TOWS Matrix has been used for developing alternative strategies for organizations and for analyzing the competitive advantages of nations as well as for developing a career strategy. Search the
Search the Internet for the term “strategic intent” and compare the intents of four organizations.
Search the Internet for “competing for the future” and find reviews of the book by that name by Hamel and Prahalad.
Why is experience often referred to not only as an expensive basis for decisionmaking, but also as a dangerous one? How can a manager make the best use of experience?
In a decision problem you now know of, how and where would you apply the principle of the limiting factor? Did you apply this principle in selecting the class or section of the class you are
Identify five decision problems and recommend programmed or non-programmed decisions. If the examples are from an organizational setting, did they occur at upper or lower levels?
“Decision-making is the primary task of the manager.”Comment.
Think of a problem that was creatively solved. Did the solution come from group discussion or was it the result of an individual effort? Reconstruct the phases of the creative process.
What is the difference between invention and innovation?
Your boss offers you a promotion to a position in a location that your family does not like. Make the necessary assumptions, and then state how and what you would decide.
Ask for one recommendation from a current or former colleague for your LinkedIn profile.
Search the Internet for “creativity” and illustrate how creativity can be applied to decision-making.
Find three applications of brainstorming on the Internet.
Since the positions in an organization must be occupied by people and since an effective organization depends on people, it is often said that the best organization arises when a manager hires good
A formal organization is often conceived of as a communication system. Is it? How?
Construct a diagram depicting the formal organization of an enterprise or activity with which you are familiar. How does this organization chart help or hinder the establishment of an environment for
Using the same enterprise or activity as in question 3, chart its informal organization. Does it help or hinder the formal organization? Why?
When you become a manager, what criteria will you favor to determine your span of management?
Organize a family picnic using the steps suggested in this chapter.
Interview a manager in your community and ask him or her how many subordinates he or she has. Are different numbers of subordinates supervised at the top, the middle, and the bottom of the
Offer to provide a reference to a colleague on LinkedIn.
Some sociologists tell us that organization structuring is a social invention. What do you think they mean? Do they imply that there is a “right” or “wrong” way to organize?What would you
If you were the president of a company that was organized along functional lines and a consultant suggested that you organize along territorial or product lines, what might concern you in following
Why do most large department store and supermarket chains organize their stores on a territorial basis and the internal store units by products? Give examples from your own experience.
Why do most small companies use functionally organized departments?
Why are so many national government agencies organized primarily on a territorial basis?
Do you see any reasons why managing by objectives may result in increased use of matrix organization structures?
How does this chapter illustrate a situational approach to management?
Divide the class into groups of four or five students(depending on class size). Assign one pattern of departmentation to each group (assign two to each if the class is small). The groups should
Select a company and identify the departmentation pattern(or patterns) it uses. Draw an organization chart for the firm.Why do you think the company selected the type of departmentation it did? Would
Select several interest groups to follow on your LinkedIn account.
Search the Internet for the term “matrix organization” to find examples of the grid. Also, note the difficulties those companies may have encountered.
Search the Internet for the term “strategic business units.”Look for the ways that various organizations are utilizing such units to enhance their management.
What are the kinds of power exercised in your organization or school?
Take as examples a number of positions in any kind of enterprise (business, church, government, etc.). Classify each as line or staff.
How many cases of functional authority in organization have you seen? Analyzing a few, do you agree that they could have been avoided? If avoidance had been possible, would you have eliminated them?
If you were asked to advise a young college graduate who has accepted a staff position as assistant to a factory manager, what suggestions would you make?
Why is poor delegation of authority often found to be the most important cause of managerial failure?
In many countries, companies often have grown from within and are family owned. In these companies, very little authority is decentralized. What do you think would explain this tendency? What effect
If you were a manager, would you decentralize authority?State several reasons for your answer. How would you make sure that you did not decentralize too much?
Should authority be pushed down in an organization as far as it will go? Why or why not?
Many psychologists have pointed to the advantage of job enlargement, which refers to assigning tasks that are not so specialized that an individual loses a sense of doing things that are meaningful.
Taking an organized enterprise with which you have some familiarity, can you find any of the deficiencies that commonly occur in organization structures?
It is sometimes stated that the typical organization chart is undemocratic, in that it emphasizes the superiority and inferiority of people and positions. Comment.
What would you need to know to plan an organization structure? How far ahead should you plan it? How would you go about making such a plan?
Take an organization that you know and discuss its culture.Is the culture helping or hindering the organization with respect to the achievement of its goals? In what ways?
Why is the function of staffing seldom approached logically?Briefly describe the systems approach to staffing. How is staffing related to other managerial functions and activities?
List and evaluate external factors affecting staffing. Which ones are most critical today? Explain.
What are the dangers and difficulties in applying a policy of promotion from within? What is meant by a policy of open competition? Do you favor such a policy? Why or why not?
What is the systems approach to selection of managers?Why is it called a systems approach? How does it differ from other approaches?
What are some of the factors that are important in designing individual jobs and jobs for work teams? Which ones seem most important to you? Why?
The Peter Principle has been widely quoted in management circles. What do you think of it? Do you think that it could ever apply to you? Does it mean that all chief executives are incompetent?
What is an assessment center? How does it work? Would you like to participate in such a center? Why or why not?
Do you think that managers should be appraised regularly?If so, how?
Many firms evaluate managers on personality factors such as aggressiveness, cooperation, leadership, and attitude.Do you think this kind of rating makes sense?
An argument has been made in this book for appraising managers on their ability to manage. Should anything more be expected of them?
How do you feel about an appraisal system based on results expected and realized? Would you prefer to be appraised on this basis? If not, why not?
On what basis should your performance in college be appraised?
What would you say to a student who tells you that he studied at least four hours every day in preparation for the midterm examination and still got only a C grade?
Describe the most rewarding and most stressful aspects of your job or your college experience.
What is your career goal? Have you developed a plan to achieve your goal? If not, why not?

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