1.1 Management: What It Is, What Its Benefits Are

• Management is defined as the pursuit of organizational goals, efficiently and effectively. Efficiently means to use resources wisely and cost-effectively. Effectively means to achieve results, to make the right decisions and successfully carry them out to achieve the organization's goals.

1.2 Six Challenges to Being a Star Manager

• Challenge #1, managing for competitive advantage, means an organization must stay ahead in four areas: being responsive to customers; innovating new products or services; offering better quality; being more efficient.
• Challenge #2 is managing for diversity among different genders, ages, races, and ethnicities.
• Challenge #3 is managing for globalization, the expanding universe.
• Challenge #4 is managing for computers and telecommunications—information technology.
• Challenge #5 is managing for right and wrong, or ethical standards.
• Challenge #6 is managing for your own happiness and life goals.

1.3 What Managers Do: The Four Principal Functions

• The four management functions are represented by the abbreviation POLC: planning, organizing, leading, controlling.
• The first function is defined as setting goals and deciding how to achieve them.
• The second function is defined as arranging tasks, people, and other resources to accomplish the work.
• The third function is defined as motivating, directing, and otherwise influencing people to work hard to achieve the organization's goals.
• The fourth function is defined as monitoring performance, comparing it with goals, and taking corrective action as needed.

1.4 Pyramid Power: Levels & Areas of Management

• Within an organization, there are managers at three levels: top, middle, and first-line.
• Top managers make long-term decisions about the overall direction of the organization and establish the objectives, policies, and strategies for it.
• Middle managers implement the policies and plans of their superiors and supervise and coordinate the activities of the managers below them.
• First-line managers make short-term operating decisions, directing the daily tasks of nonmanagement personnel.
• There are three types of organizations classified according to the three different purposes for which they are formed. (1) For-profit organizations are formed to make money by offering products or services. (2) Nonprofit organizations offer services to some, but not to make a profit. (3) Mutual-benefit organizations are voluntary collections of members created to advance members' interests.

1.5 Roles Managers Must Play Successfully

• The Mintzberg study shows that, first, a manager relies more on verbal than on written communication; second, managers work long hours at an intense pace; and, third, a manager's work is characterized by fragmentation, brevity, and variety.
• From this, Mintzberg concluded that managers play three broad types of roles: interpersonal, informational, and decisional.
• In the first role, the manager acts as figurehead, leader, and liaison.
• In the second role, the manager acts as monitor, disseminator, and spokesperson.
• In the third role, the manager acts as entrepreneur, disturbance handler, resource allocator, and negotiator.

1.6 The Skills Star Managers Need

• The three skills that star managers cultivate are technical, conceptual, and human.
• The first set of skills consists of job-specific knowledge needed to perform well in a specialized field.
• The second set of skills consists of the ability to think analytically, to visualize an organization as a whole, and to understand how the parts work together.
• The third set of skills consists of the ability to work well in cooperation with other people to get things done.