Management Strategies

The wide range of possible performance criteria for business enterprises raises serious questions of definition and measurement. Indeed, measurement is at the heart of the analysis of success and failure of business operations, and much depends on the quality of the information that is available. The evaluation of business performance comes into sharp focus with the pUblication of companies' annual and semi-annual accounts, which are then followed by commentaries from stockbrokers and business analysts in reports to investors and in articles in the financial press. Captains of industry may not have to suffer the indignity of frequent public opinion polls that gauge the popularity of politicians. Nevertheless, they are plagued by a similar phenomenon, in that views expressed by analysts, customers, shareholders and investors, serve as powerful reminders to senior executives that the business world is subject to many upheavals and that even the most seemingly secure can suddenly fall from grace.

Autorentext

Professor Sam Eilon was formerly head of the Department of Management Science at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, a former Member of the Monopolies and Mergers Commission in the UK and a founder Chief Editor of Omega, the International Journal of Management Science. He has been a director of several public companies and a management consultant for many years, concentrating on corporate strategy and analysis of corporate performance.

Klappentext

The task of management has become increasingly complex in recent years. Chief executives and senior managers are confronted with the daunting challenge of making sense of a myriad of variables that affect the performance of business systems and of determining causal relationships that underlie seemingly unstructured problems. A wide gulf now exists between theory and practice in the field of management. Pronouncements by theorists have become increasingly unintelligible to practitioners, while practical propositions by management consultants - often presented as recipes derived from experience and case studies - often lack any firm theoretical foundation and are largely based on limited and unreliable hard evidence. This has given rise to many fashions in the way management is practised. The trouble with fashionable doctrines is that they come and go. And while they are in vogue, they can lead to the adoption of what may be regarded as management mispractices, namely practices rooted in questionable beliefs, which are based on false premises. This book is written for managers, management consultants, and students of management, including business school faculty. The range of topics included here should provoke the reader to ponder on the complexities of the multi-faceted managerial scene and to question the basis of many managerial practices as well as the validity of theories propounded in the literature.

Inhalt
1 Structuring the unstructured.- 2 Mission incomplete.- 3 Board size and corporate failure.- 4 Determinants of corporate performance.- 5 Prominent performance ratios.- 6 A simple formula.- 7 A misleading performance ratio.- 8 Use and misuse of productivity ratios.- 9 The bottom-liners.- 10 In pursuit of market share.- 11 Intrepid gurus.- 12 On competitiveness.- 13 OR at the top.- 14 Managing change.- 15 Closing the gap.- 16 Measuring quality of information systems.- 17 Divide and rule.- 18 Centralism versus federalism.- 19 Hondaism myth and reality.- 20 A cake can be cut in many ways.- 21 Time management.- 22 Management performance appraisal.- 23 What makes Sammy run.- 24 Don't spit in the soup, we all have to eat.- 25 The role of business schools.- 26 Business policy for beginners.