Understanding Business Chap 7

Enabling

Giving workers the education and tools they need to make decisions.

Objectives

Specific, short-term statements detailing how to achieve organization's goals.

Goals

Broad, long-term accomplishments an organization wishes to attain.

Decision Making

Choosing among 2+ alternatives.

Leading

Creating a vision for the organization and guiding, trading, coaching, and motivating others to work effectively to achieve the organization's goals and objectives.

External Customers

Dealers, who buy products to sell to others, and ultimate customers (or end users), who buy products for their own personal use.

Vision

Encompassing explanation of why the organization exists and where it's trying to head.

Knowledge Management

Finding right info, keeping info in a readily accessible place, and making info knwon to everyone in firm.

Participative (Democratic) Leadership

Leadership style that consists of managers and employees working together to make decisions.

Autocratic Leadership

Leadership style that involves making managerial decisions w/out consulting others.

Free-Rein Leadership

Leadership style that involves managers setting objectives and employees being relatively free to do whatever it takes to accomplish those objectives.

Technical Skills

Skills that involve ability to perform tasks in a specific discipline or department.

Conceptual Skills

Skills that involve ability to picture organization as a whole and relationship among its various parts.

Human Relation Skills

Skills that involve communcation and motivation; they enable managers to work thro and with people.

Internal Customers

Individuals and units within firm that recieve services from other individuals or units.

Brainstorming

Coming up with as many solutions to a problem as possible in a short period of time with no censoring of ideas.

Top Management

Highest level of management, consisiting of pres and other key company executies who develop strategic plans.

Middle Management

Level of management that includes general managers, division managers, and branch and plant managers who are responsible for tactical planning and controlling.

PMI

Listing all plusses for a solution in one column, all minuses in another, and implications in a third column.

Planning

Management function that includes antcipating trends and determining the best strategies and tactics to achieve organizational goals and objectives.

Organizing

Management function that includes designing the structure of the organization and creating conditions and systems in which everyone and everything work together to achieve the organzation's goals and objectives.

Staffing

Management function that includes hiring, motivating, and retaining the best ppl available to accomplish company's objectives.

Controlling

Management function that involves establishing clear standards to determine whether or not an organization is progressing toward its goals and objectives, rewarding people for doing a good job, and taking corrective action if they are not.

Supervisory Management

Managers who are directly responsible for supervising workers and evaluating their daily performance.

Mission Statement

Outline of the fundamental purposes of an organization.

SWOT Analysis

Planning tool used to analyze an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Strategic Planning

Process of determining the major goals of organization and policies and strategies for obtaining and using resources to achieve those goals.

Tactical Planning

Process of developing detailed, short-term statements about what is to be done, who is to do it, and how it is to be done.

Contingency Planning

Process of preparing alternative courses of action that may be used if primary plans don't achieve organzation's objective.

Operational Planning

Process of setting work standards and schedules necessary to implement company's tactical objectives.

Problem Solving

Process of solving everyday problems that occur. Less formal than decision making and usually calls for quicker action.

Management

Process used to accomplish organizational goals thro planning, organizing, leading, and controlling ppl and other organzational resources.

Organizational Chart

Visual device that shows relationships among ppl and divides organization's work; it shows who is accountable for the completion of specific work and who reports to whom.