Assignment On Business Management and Environment

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Part A

Question: I
“No country can develop industrially without proper management”- Do
you agree? Discuss.

Ans:

“No country can develop
industrially without proper management”

– Yes, I’m agree
with the statement & the discussion about my opinion

is given
below:

There
are two parts of this question. The first one is Industrial development and the
second one is proper Management. Both parts are important for the Development
of a country. Industrial Development is the most essential part of any country
to step forward and when a country is growing up through industries then it
must maintain a proper Management. Otherwise the Machine of the Industry will
not run properly.

The following terms should be considered for the
industrial development of any country;

The rise of Factories –

Before
the industrial Revolution people worked with hand tools, manufacturing articles
in their own homes or in small shops. In the third quarter of the 18th
cent. Steam power was applied to machinery, and people and machines were
brought together under on roof in factories, where the manufacturing process
could be supervised. This was the beginning of shop management. In the next
hundred years factories grew rapidly in size, in degree of mechanization, and
in complexity of operation. The growth however was accompanied by much waste
and inefficiency. In the United States many engineers, spurred by the increased
competition of the post-Civil War era, began to seek ways of improving plan
efficiency.

The
Development of Industrial Management

Studies of Worker Performance:

The first sustained effort in the direction of improved
efficiency was made by Frederick Winslow Taylor an assistant foreman in the
Midvale Steel Company, who in the 1880s undertook a series of studies to
determine whether workers used unnecessary motions and hence to much time in
performing operations at a machine. Each operation required to turn out an
article or part was analyzed and studied minutely, and superfluous motions were
eliminated. Records were kept of the performance of workers and standards were
adopted for each operation. The early studies resulted in a faster pace of work
and the introduction of rest periods.

Management
of the Machine:

Industrial
management also involves studying the performance of machines as well as
people. Specialists are employed to keep machines in good working condition and
to ensure the quality of their production. The flow of materials through the
plant is supervised to ensure that neither workers nor machines are idle.
Constant inspection is made to keep output up to standard. Charts are used for
recording the accomplishment of both workers and machines and for comparing
them wit!, established standards. Careful accounts are kept of the cost of each
operation. When a new article is to be manufactured it is given a design that
will make it suitable for machine production, and each step in its, manufacture
is planned, including the machines and materials to be used.

Other
Aspects of Management:

The
principles of scientific management have been gradually extended to every
department of industry, including office work, financing, and marketing. Soon
after 1910 American firms established the first personnel departments, and
eventually some of the larger companies took the lead in creating environments
conducive to worker efficiency. Safety devices, better sanitation, plant
cafeterias, and facilities for rot and recreation were provided, thus adding to
the welfare of employees and enhancing morale. Many such improvements were made
at the insistence of employee groups, especially labor unions.

Over
the years, workers and their unions also sought and often won higher wages and
increased benefits, including group health and life insurance and liberal
retirement pensions. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, cutbacks and downsizing
in many American businesses substantially reduced many of these benefits. Some
corporations permit employees to buy stock; others make provision for employee
representation of the board of directors or on the shop grievance committee,
Many corporations provide special opportunities for training and promotion for
workers who desire advancement, and some have made efforts to solve such
difficult problems as job security and a guaranteed annual wage.

Modern Trends

Modern technological devices, particularly in the areas
of computers, electronics, thermodynamics, and mechanics, have make automatic
and semiautomatic machines a reality. The development of such automation is
bringing about a second Industrie1 revolution and is causing vast
changes in commerce as well as the way work is organ bed. Such technological
changes and the need to improve productivity and quality of products in
traditional factory systems also changed industrial management practices. In
the 1960s Swedish automobile companies discovered that they could improve
productivity with a system of group assembly. In a contrast to older
manufacturing techniques where a worker was responsible for assembling only one
part of the car, group assembly gave a group of workers the responsibility for
assembling an entire car.

The system was also applied in Japan, where managers
developed a number of other innovative systems to lower costs and improve the
quality of products. One Japanese innovation, known as quality circles, allowed
workers to offer management suggestions of how to make production more
efficient and to solve problems. Workers were also given the right to stop the
assembly line of something gone wrong, a sharp departure from U.S. factories.
By carefully controlling the manufacturing process, Japanese mangers were able
to cut waste, improve productivity, and reduce inventory, thus significantly
reducing costs and improving quality. By the early 1980s Japanese companies,
which had once been criticized for producing for producing low-quality goods,
had established a reputation for efficiently producing high-quality, high-tech
products. In the 1980s and early 90s many US. companies looked to increase
their competitiveness by adapting Japanese methods for improving manufacturing
quality.

Question: 2 Identify the pattern of decentralization of a company you know of.

Draw
an organization chart for the firm, would you
recommend a different

arrangement?
Justify.

Ans: When people see a flock of birds flying in
close “V” formation, most assume the bird at the front of the
“V” is the leader of the flock. Not so. says MI 1 management guru and
organizational theorist Thomas Malone. In fact, the biologists who study bird
behavior now believe that all the birds in the flock are simply thing based on
the same set of simple rules about where they fly in relation to their
neighbors and the air currents they field. If just so happens that form those
rules emerges this V-shaped formation. Watch the flock closely and you will see
that no one bird stays in front of the “V” for long. The bird in
front isn’t the leader at all: its position is a more or less random result of
the way the birds fly. Centralized leadership, it isn’t.

We
see a leader at the front of the “V” theorizes Malone, because of
what an MIT colleague Mitchcll Resnick calls a “centralized mind
set”. In other words, human beings have an inbuilt – even unconscious –
tendency to assume that matters- and particularly organizations- must be
managed in a centralized way.

“People
scorn 10 have to strong attachments to centralized ways of thinking: they
assume that a pattern can exist only of someone (or something) creates and
orchestrates the pattern”. Ransack wrote in a 1998 article in Complexity
3. “When we see a flock of bird?, they generally assume the bird in front
is leading the others- when in fact it is not. And when people design new
organizational structures, they (cud to impose centralized control even when it
is not needed.” Only if we can overcome that rigid mind- set, Malone says,
can we open ourselves to the enormous opportunities for rethinking the way
organizations work that have been created by the wave information technology
that has surged through the business world in the past decade or so. Advance in
It have generated once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, to rethink the way the
organization is working, severely undermined the old mode centralized
authority. The Internet is now so ubiquitous that small, loosely tvd groups of
“e-lancers” can take on large, hierarchical corporations. The (ethnologies
are pretty well there now, Malone says; it is just that the continuing
post-dictum-boom hangover is hampering organizations from realizing their
genuine potential. Malone has drawn on 20years of groundbreaking research to
foreshadow a workplace revolution that is set to dramatically change
organizational structures and the roles employees play in them. To succeed,
managers must grasp these changes, he says.

Malone, renowned for his forward thinking, is the Patrick
J McGovern professor of management at the- MIT Sloan School of Management and
the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science in
Cambridge, Massachusetts. In a 1987 article lie predicted many of the major
c-business developments of the past decade, including electronic buying and
selling, e-markets, organizational outsourcing of non-core functions and the
use of intelligent agents for commerce.

In
his just released Future of Work, Mow the New Order of Business Will Shape Your
Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, published by Harvard
Business School Press. Malone provides the first credible mode], combined with
the “amazing pattern” that has seen societies and business
organizations move increasingly towards “decentralized decision- making,
provides compelling evidence that we are in the midst of a fundamental and
predictable change “one that may be as important to business as the shift
to democracy has been to government”. Equally importantly, he explores the
skills that managers will need in a workplace in which the power to decide
belongs to everyone. “I think the key difference that I see between the
organizations to the future and the organizations of today is that there will
be, I believe, more freedom, more decentralization of decision- making in the
organizations of the nature,” Malone told CIO magazine. “One of the
most important things is decentralization. People have talked about this
before, but now changes are happening much more radically.”

“Information
technology is enabling decision-making to be far more widely dispersed in both large
and small firms. With cheaper communication cost, many more people can make
decisions for themselves, because they have the information they need, And when
more people make more of their own decisions, they are often more creative,
more motivated, more dedicated. That means we’ll be able to have many of the
economic benefits of large organizations without having to give up human
benefits of smaller ones: things like motivation, creativity and freedom.

In
fact Malone’s findings support the conclusion of other researchers that greater
use of IT can lead either to centralization or to decentralization, depending
on the situation. For instance, the model shows how IT can support more
centralization when economies of scale are important and less where the
emphasis is on motivation and flexibility. But Malone’s model goes further than
others in revealing that in many cases the benefits of centralization are the
benefits of “bigness”, not the benefits of centralization per sc. and
it shows that when communication costs are low enough it is often possible to
decentralize in a way that provides those self-same benefits of
“bigness”- scale economies for instance as well as the benefits of smallness”
such as motivation and flexibility.

”Decentralized business organizations represent a new
world of work, with new rules and new demands.” Malone writes.

Loosening the Hierarchy

When
search engine technology company Goggle starts a major project, it does not
create a huge venture with lost of management layers. Instead it sets up a few,
autonomous engineering teams- often of only about three members each and sets
them loose, giving them wide latitude on how they do their work. When the teams
need to communicate, they usually do so directly, either face-to-face or
electronically,

This
is an example of a loose hierarchy, one of the numbers of ways organizations
are choosing to decentralize.

In
loose hierarchies, Malone says, there are still hierarchical structures and
bosses, but a huge amount of decision-making authority is delegated to very low
levels of the organization. Also epitomized by the group of people that
developed

Linux,
“one of the best operating systems available”, loose hierarchies are
a new, highly decentralized way of organizing knowledge work.

Loose
hierarchies have dense communication; no matter how widely dispersed their
members are, their members need to stay in touch with each other. They lack
central control, with relatively few decisions being centralized. And the
members of the hierarchy have the freedom to participate: they can join in or
drop out of the effort wherever they fell like it.

Loose
hierarchies are no longer the exclusive domains of universities, consulting
firms and software development groups, AES corporation, one of the : largest suppliers of electric power in the
world, with revenue of SUS8.6 billion and 36.000employees-“in 2002, runs
on the notion that every employee should be a businessperson – “a
well-rounded generalist, a mini-CEO responsible for important decisions in the
company”, as Malone puts it.

Then there are the organizations that have harnessed a
second way of making decentralized decisions: democracy. In democracies, Malone
says, individual workers get to vote on key corporate decisions, and in many
cases even on “who their managers are going to be”. For instance,
when the managers of any of the 143Whole Foods supermarkets in North America
decide to hire someone, they know their decision is really only a recommendation.
Before becoming a permanent employee, every candidate words for a three-day
trial, period and then the entire departmental team votes on whether to keep
them. There have been experiments in workplace democracy before, Malone points
out, but most have proved successful only in limited situations, if at all.
“As communication costs continue their dramatic fall, however,” he
says, “the democratic form of decentralized decision- making is becoming
feasible in far more places than ever before”.

Over
recent times organizations have experimented with opinion polling their
employees (such as when Hewlett-Packard proposed to buy Compaq Computer in late
2001). participative decision-making (no one at US clothing giant Gore-Tex bar
the president and secretary have a position title- they are all called an
associate and becoming a manager means going out on your own initiative to find
fellow employees who will agree to work for you), and cross-organizational
democracy (epitomized by Bank of America and the other banks BoA had licensee!
to use the BankAmerica credit card, which were in fact competitors, as the) set
up a for-profit membership corporation to deal with major operational
problems).

Malone
says democracies give those involved a greater sense of autonomy (and thus
creativity and motivation) than hierarchies but less than in a market
structure, which is the other way organizations are choosing to decentralize.
“The third and fourth ways I see decentralizing happening are two separate
forms of markets,” Malone says. ‘The simplest to understand is what I call
external markets- that is markets as we know them where more things are
outsourced to other companies or freelance contractors, including things
performed inside a single company.

“The
fourth possibility is what I call internal markets, where you have employees of
a single company buying and selling things among themselves inside the
company’s boundaries, as a way of allocating resources or making other
decision”.

“We
usually think of a market as something where separate companies or at least
legally separate individuals buy and sell things to each other with contracts,
exchange of money and so on,” he says. “Most people have heard about
the advantages- at teat in principle-that come from that market way of organizing
things. So most people are familiar with those same benefits inside a single
company, if you lot people inside the company buy and sell things to each
other, as if they were operating in a market.”

The
way many IT organizations have been set up to handle transfer costs can be seen
as a precursor to the kind of internal markets Malone is talking about.

Those early forms of internal markets are usually done at
a fairly high level. For instance a vice president might make deals with other
vice presidents about the internal charge rate for work to be done at a fairly
high level of the organization and at a fairly gross grouping. That is a fairly
large-scale transaction. “1 think one of the most interesting
possibilities of these new information technologies is that it makes it easier
to do that same kind of thing of a much smaller scale, much finer grained
transactions, and at much lower levels of the

organization.”
Malone says.

His
book provides an extensive example of how a large semiconductor manufacturing
company might use such a structure to allocate manufacturing. Resources to
their products. In the scenario outlined, each of the salespeople in the
company would essentially be a buyer of products in the internal marketplace,
and each of the manufacturing plants would be a seller of product or
manufacturing capacity to make those products. Both parties would then turn to
an internal futures market to buy and sell products for not only current but
also future needs. For instance the price for 100 integrated circuit chips
might be $60 right now, but S30 in six weeks due to a drop-off in anticipated
demand. There are ways any one of these models could bring negatives to an
organization, Malone says, but they also offer scope to make organizations not
only more economically efficient, but also better places for people to work.
And at any rate, they are certainly, if not inevitably, likely to hold sway in
the future, he says. “I believe there are powerful forces that are leading
us in this direction, powerful economic forces especially, that have to do with
the decreasing cost of communication and the possibilities that creates.

“I
don’t think that it is preordained that this is all going to happen quickly or
even necessarily in ways that are the best for us. In other words I think we do
have choices. We have choices about how quickly we embrace these underlying
trends, and we have choices about how we actually implement them. And I think
the ways we make those choices may in fact make a big difference in whether the
organization we create, that in some sense the world we create, is a better one
than what we have today,”

Outsourcing,
Malone says, is not only one of the force causing the trend to
decentralization: it is also in some ways a result of those same trends.
One-way to achieve decentralized decision- making is outsourcing in search of
economic benefits, flexibility and efficiency. But the same trends are giving
organizations more flexibility in terms of where they outsource work to, and
outsourcers more flexibility about who they work for.

And while outsourcing in the short term is potentially a
huge problem for those people who find their jobs displaced by lower earners
elsewhere in the world, in the long term, global outsourcing both more or less
inevitable and more or less desirable. “I think it’s also important to remember
that as the economy becomes more efficient through outsourcing some jobs to
places where they can be done more economically, more jobs are created and
often better jobs are created in the high-wage countries,” he says.

Generation Apps

Choosing the right decentralized model for the organization
begins with realizing the choices are there to be made. CIO should be thinking
carefully now about the likely impact on their organizations of the trends
predicted in his book, Malone says. “For instance, if the predictions and
observations I make in the book are correct, then I think it means there will
be increased emphasis on some applications that hardly exist at all
today, and on others that exist but that are not used as heavily or
regularly as they will be in the future.”

The
first and probably most important is communication applications in general.
“When we use the term computing, it implies a technology that computes
things, but in fact 1 think it’s important to realize that the vast majority of
ways that computers arc actually useful in business are not so much to compute
things, in the sense of doing arithmetic, but to help communicate things. I believe
here is a whole class of communication applications that is likely to become
more and more important in the world of the future.”

One
set of these communication applications is what used to be called groupware,
with some pan now being called social software- the tools for collaborative
work. E-mail and instant messaging are going to become ever more important to
organizations, as is a class of applications that is not always a part of there
CIO1 domain but which can be vitally important; that pure
communication application like videoconferencing and audio conferencing. These
will all increasingly run of the same infrastructure, and managing them
effectively and making them easily and cheaply available to people throughout
an organization will be an important pan of a CIO,s job. Another set of
applications that hardly exists at all today, but will become more important,
is the application software necessary to those internal markets.

Malone says, there is a third set of new applications-
one that vendors have barely begum thinking about- which be calls
“democracy applications”. These are applications that will solicit
people’s opinions or votes on issues. “1 think certainly its quite
possible to do much more voting and much more opinion pulling with the
information technology that we have today, and I think we’re likely to see some
quite interesting new examples over the next five or 10 years/’ he says. CIOs
will also need to take responsibility for facilitating distance working, which
is set to become an increasingly important part of the technical infrastructure
of a company. “I think a lot of CIOs haven’t yet wrestled with how
important distance working is going to be. and all that they will have to deal
with to make that work easily and cheaply and conveniently and enjoyably for
the people who will be doing it more and more.”

Malone
believes all of this opens up truly intriguing possibilities for CIOs to
transform themselves by becoming not just the information architect, but
becoming the organizational architect.

Coos
have an opportunity to play a very important role in defining and managing the
processes that enable decentralization. Malone’s book outlines a new way of
thinking about and analyzing that problem in terms of coordination of
particular processes using a process architecture that gives a detailed
set of guidelines to ensure activities carried out by a
dispersed, autonomous people merge to create a unified whole.

“One
of the most important points in that part of my book is that to really manage
these processes in the world of the world of the future, you need to look below
the surface of the process. You need to look at what I call the deep structure
of a process, and that means the core activities and the key synergies or
relationships among those activities that must be done and must be managed for
the goals of the overall process to be achieved,” he says.

Take
the selling process. Malone says the surface structure of a sales process might
include hundreds of steps that can happen before a sale finally gets made, but
when you think about the deep structure of the sales processes, there are
really only five or six things that have to happen for a sale to occur. A
seller must identify a potential customer, identify what that potential
customer’s needs are, communicate to the potential customer what they can sell,
get the order, then deliver the product and get the money.

“Those five or sex things are essentially the deep
structure of selling. It’s hard to imagine any sales process ever occurring
repeatedly and well without somehow doing those things. So by getting down to
deep structures you can get an insight into what actually needs to be managed.
So as organizations become more and more flexible, as more and more things get
outsourced or you have more and more constantly changing interconnections of
applications- as some people are talking about Web services- as more and more
of those things happen, the more malleable and in sonic sense the more similar
will be the details of the surface structure of the process.

Part-B

Case Study

Q.
WHO ARE THE EFFECTIVE LEADERS?

In a search for effective leaders, 206 CEO respondents from
fortune 500 and service 500 companies identified as the three top leaders Don
(no. 1) at Ford, Lee Iacocca at Chrysler, and jack Welch at General Electric.
The overwhelming majority of those questioned felt that there is no leadership
crisis in the United States. On the other hand, those holding another view
pointed the ineffectiveness of managers in competing in the global market; the
excessive focus on short- term results, often at the expense of long- term
company health; and the lack of investment in plats. About two-third of the
respondents through that leadership can be taught, especially through
especially through job rotation, in-company training, and delegation of
authority. But there was also the religion that latent leadership qualities
have to be the foundation of leadership. Although not the basis of the survey,
Fortune identified the following factors for successful business leadership. Trust
in subordinates is the foundation for delegation authority. A manager gets
things done through people. Leaders must provide a vision for the enterprise
and inspire others to commit themselves to this vision. Leaders must take
command in times of crisis. Even those who subscribe to participative
management realize the at critical times they have to take charge. Taking risk
is a part of business- not careless risk, but calculated ones. Probably those
who have never failed-(who played it safe) may got have managed well. Leaders
need to be very competent in their fields and command the respect of complies.
A top executive surrounded by ‘yes- Sayers will get an incorrect view of what
is really going of within and outside the organization. Thus, executives should
invite dissenting views; effective leaders see and understand the big” picture.
They simplify complex situations and problems so that they can be understood.

QUESTIONS
AND THE ANSWERS

Q. 1. Who was the leader identified in he survey? Why do you think they
have been effective?

Ans:  There top leaders identified in the survey,
they are as follows:

Name of the Leaders Company

1. Doi.retcrson FORD

2. Lee Lacocca   CHRYSLER

3. Jack Welch GENERAL
ELECTRIC

They
have been effective cause, they have-

• Leadership style

• Vision

• Ideas

• Tentative decision maker

• Superior power

• Orientation & Generation employees

Overall,
the various pattern of behavior favored during the process of directing &

Influencing
workers, they often do.

Q- 2. What was the leadership characteristics identified by Fortune?
Do you agree with the seven-statements about the characteristics? Should other
factors be taken into account?

Ans:  I do agree with the statement and
characteristics identified by fortune, which have been stated below-

  • The
    effectiveness of the manager
  • The
    competition in the global market
  • The
    accusative focus on short term results
  • The
    expense of long term company health
  • The
    lack of investment
  •  The lack of plants  
  • The
    lack of company training  

Question:-3. Do yon think that leadership can be taught? Explain.

Ans: I
think, basically, leadership is the quality that cannot be taught but from the
stated survey, about two- third of the respondent thought that leadership can
be taught, especially-

• Through job rotation

• In company training

• And the delegation of authority

Fortune
identified (he following factors for successful leaders—

• Leaders must provide visions

• Trust in subordinates

• Commitment

• Participation

• Realizing the crisis moment

• Taking risk