Question & Answer

1.    : Discuss some of the ways that organizations and jobs have changed over the past ten years. What changes do you anticipate over the next ten years? How might these changes affect the manager’s job and the skills that a manager needs to be successful.

1.    : A college professor told her students, “The purpose of a management course is to teach students about management, not to teach them to be managers.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Discuss.

1.    : If managerial work is characterized by variety, fragmentation, and brevity, how do managers perform basic management functions such as planning and strategic management, which would seem to require reflection and analysis?

1.    You are a bright, hard-working, entry-level manager who fully intends to rise through the ranks. Your performance evaluation gives you high marks for your technical skills, but low marks when it comes to people skills. Do you think people skills can be learned, or do you need to rethink your career path? If people skills can be learned, how would you go about it?

: Think about the highly publicized safety grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX jetliner. One observer said that the goal of profit had taken precedence over the goal of safety within the company. Do you think managers can succeed at both profit and safety simultaneously? DOrganizational effectiveness is the degree to which the organization achieves a stated goal or succeeds in accomplishing what it tries to do. Organizational efficiency refers to the amount of resources used to achieve an organizational goal. It is based on how much raw materials, money, and people are necessary for producing a given volume of output. The ultimate responsibility of managers is to achieve high performance, which is the organization’s ability to attain its goals by using resources in an efficient and effective manner.

Although efficiency and effectiveness are both important for performance, most people would probably say that effectiveness is the more important concept. The reason is that internal efficiency has no value if it does not enable the organization to achieve its goals and respond to the external environment. On the other hand, an organization that is effective does achieve its goals, by definition. One of these goals should involve continuously increasing efficiency.

Managers can and should improve both efficiency and effectiveness simultaneously. As noted above, one of any organization’s primary goals should be to continuously improve efficiency. To the extent that the organization increases its success in achieving this goal, along with others, its effectiveness also improves.

1.    : Why do some organizations seem to have a new CEO every two or three years, whereas others have top leaders who stay with the company for many years (e.g., Warren Buffett’s 50 years at Berkshire Hathaway)? What factors about the manager or about the company might account for this difference?

1.    Jeff Immelt, CEO of GE, tweeted for the first time in September 2012, prompting this response: “@JeffImmelt how come my grandfather got on twitter before you?” Do you think managers should use Twitter and other social media? Can you be an effective manager today without using new media? Why?

1.    Assume that you are a project manager at a biotechnology company and that you work with managers from research, production, and marketing on a major product modification. You notice that every memo you receive from the marketing manager has been copied to senior management. At every company function, she spends time talking to the big shots. You are also aware that sometimes when you and the other project members are working tirelessly over the project, she is playing golf with senior managers. What is your evaluation of her behavior? As project manager, what do you do?

1.    : How do you feel about having a manager’s responsibilities in today’s world, which is characterized by social, technological, and other sudden changes in the environment? Describe some skills and competencies that are important to managers working in these conditions.

What are some of the key environmental forces that have the way projects are managed? What has been the effect of these forces on the management of project?

1.       Why do you think there is a trend toward greater democracy and decentralization in organizations today? Would a radical decentralized system be effective with Gen Z employees? Why?

: Define the management types and roles that managers perform in organizations.

: Identify the personal challenges faced by new managers and ways of overcoming them

: Describe technical, human, and conceptual skills and their relevance for managers.

Explain the difference between efficiency and effectiveness, as well as their importance for organizational performance.

: Define the four management functions and the type of management activity associated with ach.

Explain five management competencies and the trend toward bosslessness in today’s world.

Imagine that you are an ambassador of a developing country at an international conference. What would you try to persuade the rich countries to do in order to help you and other poor countries overcome the debt problem? How would you set about persuading them that it was in their own interests to help you?

What are the relative advantages and disadvantages to a developing country of rescheduling its debts compared with simply defaulting on them (either temporarily or permanently)?

Consider the arguments from the perspective of an advanced country for and against protecting its industries from imports of manufactures from developing countries.

Will the adoption of labour-intensive techniques necessarily lead to a more equal distribution of income?

Why is an overvalued exchange rate likely to encourage the use of capital-intensive technology?

If a country specialises in a good in which it has a comparative disadvantage, where will it be producing with respect to its production possibility curve?

If a disastrous harvest of rice were confined to a particular country, would (a) the world price and (b) its own domestic price of rice fluctuate significantly? What would happen to the country’s export earnings and the earnings of individual farmers?