Management Practice and Mispractice
Published on 7. May 1992
Book
Hardback
208 pages
978-0-415-07598-5 (ISBN)
Description
The task of management has become increasingly complex in recent years. Chief executives and senior management are confronted with the task of making sense of the multiple factors affecting business systems, and identifying causal relationships in seemingly unstructured problems. In the field of management, a wide gulf exists between theory and practice. Pronouncements from theorists have become increasingly unintelligible to practitioners. Practical propositions from management consultants - often in the form of recipes derived from experience and case studies - are often based on limited hard evidence. This has given rise to many fashions in management. The danger of fashionable doctrine is that they can lead to the adoption of what may be regarded as "management mispractices", namely practices that are based on questionable beliefs and premises. The topics and problems discussed in "Management Practice and Mispractice" aim to provoke the reader to think about the many issues involved and to question established doctrines and beliefs. This book should be of interest to managers, management consultants and students of management.
More details
Edition
New edition
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Edition type
New edition
Dimensions
Height: 234 mm
Width: 156 mm
Weight
480 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-415-07598-5 (9780415075985)
Copyright in bibliographic data is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or its licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Content
1. Structuring the Unstructured (on the art of decision making) 2. Mission Incomplete (on the inadequacy of mission statements) 3. Determinants of Corporate Performance (on measures and criteria) 4. Board Size - Can it Affect Corporate Failure? (on inconclusive research in this area) 5. OR at the top? (on why Operational Research has made little impact on strategy formulation) 6. A Simple Formula (on how alternative formulation of profit and cost can affect perceptions and managerial action) 7. The Bottom Liners (on the dangerous obsession with short term performance) 8. A Misleading Performance Measure (why "Return on Equity" is quite inappropriate as a corporate measure of performance) 9. Prominent Performance Ratios (common ratios in action and when they are in conflict) 10. Use and Misuse of Productivity Ratios (some ratios are meaningless) 11. A Cake Can Be Cut in Many Ways (on how to allocate overhead costs) 12. A Transfer Pricing Saga (on problems generated by alternative transfer pricing procedures) 13. Divide and Rule (on accountability and profit/cost centres) 14. Management Performance Appraisal (on how to assess managers) 15. What Makes Sammy Run? (on incentives, how they fit in and why they matter) 16. Don't Spit in the Soup, We All Have to Eat (on the need for fresh management thinking and attitudes) 17. The Role of Business Schools (on how managers can be bred) 18. Business Policy for Beginners (why conventional approaches for teaching strategy and business policy are quite misguided).