Management Issues and Development Directions, Essay Example

Select and identify and explain in your own words, one (1) of the four tasks of management.

Planning is the aspect of management that intends to foresee what is likely to happen in the future based on the current performance of an organization. Managers, standing as leaders have the capacity to oversee the values that their team members could offer. From the results garnered from efforts of the team in the past, the manager then creates a new direction of development that would set forth a sense of progress for the whole group. Seeing the capacity of the team, the manager tries to research on the market response possibilities. Understanding how the trend goes and how it is likely to shift in the coming months or years, a manager is dedicated to creating a plan that would cooperatively make use of the current market’s position and the capacities of the team to respond to the growing demand of the people they serve.

In the story about Steve Jobs, identify an example of the management task you selected.

Steve Jobs, being a man of innovation, was more focused on planning for the future. As mentioned in the article “Jobs saw his main task as leading the planning process to develop new and improved PCs. Although this was a good strategy, his management style was often arbitrary and overbearing” (3). Notably, because of being specifically focused on development and innovation, Jobs played favoritism among the teams he created thus resulting to constant argumentation and conflicts between his people. This has caused sense of breakdown on the cooperation that the people were supposed to conceive in relation to their tasks to create new innovative designs of PCs. Upon release from the Apple Company due to this particular weakness, Jobs realized how important it was to accept what he can do and manage with what he cannot. Hence, as a result, he founded the Pixar animation company and PC Maker Next. Still focused on planning, he knew that delegating the task of proper management of the other sectors of leading to his subordinate leaders would make up better results than actually depending on what he can do alone. One part of management-truth that Jobs realized was the fact that even managers themselves need support and only through the cooperation coming from such support would they actually be able to consider proper assumptions of their tasks and create good results for their people and themselves.

Reference:

A Manager’s Challenge Steve Jobs has Changes His Approach to Management (Jones – George 7th Ed., 3 – 5) and Figure 1.2 (Jones – George 7th Ed., 8.).