Management is getting things done through other people. That is the whole idea. Everything else is either how you do it, or the two words that decide whether you did it well.
The exam-safe definitionA set of activities — planning and decision making, organizing, leading, and controlling — directed at an organization’s resources (human, financial, physical, and information), with the aim of achieving organizational goals in an efficient and effective manner.Griffin, Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed.
Two shorter versions are worth having in your head: “the process of leading and directing all or part of an organisation, through the deployment and manipulation of resources” (Lecture 1), and the old one-liner, “the art of getting things done through people”. Use Griffin’s in an exam — it carries the four functions, the four kinds of resource and both performance words in one sentence.
OrganizationA group of people working together in a structured and coordinated fashion to achieve a set of goals.Griffin, ch. 1
ManagerSomeone whose primary responsibility is to carry out the management process.Griffin, ch. 1
Note the word primary. Almost everyone in an organisation does some managing. What makes someone a manager is that this is the job, not a side effect of it.
70%of the difference in team engagement is explained by the manager
Gallup pooled data on 27 million employees across 2.5 million work units and found that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores between business units. Not the pay, not the office, not the brand.
Gallup, State of the American Manager (2015)
1 in 10people have the natural talent to manage, on Gallup’s estimate
The same study found that companies fail to pick the candidate with the right talent in 82% of manager hires, and that units led by high-talent managers post around 48% higher profit. Management is a distinct job, and organisations are startlingly bad at staffing it.
Gallup (2015)
Efficient and effective are not synonyms
Efficient — using resources wisely, in a cost-effective way. Doing things right.
Effective — making the right decisions and successfully implementing them. Doing the right things.
Griffin’s “effective” includes the implementation, which makes it slightly more than the mirror of efficiency: a right decision badly executed is not effective either.
Figure 1 · the two words, crossedYou can be one without the other, and each failure looks completely different. The bottom-right quadrant is the one worth fearing: everything is measured, everything improves, and none of it matters.
Where marks get lost
Students write “efficient and effective” as if it were one phrase. Examiners split it. If a question asks you to evaluate performance, say which of the two the organisation is good at and which it is not — that single distinction is usually half the marks.
Lecture 1, slides 6–10 · Griffin ch. 1 · Drucker, “Managing for Business Effectiveness”, HBR (1963)
Part 2 of 8
Levels of management
Three levels: top, middle, first-line. What changes as you go up is not how hard you work. It is how far into the future your decisions reach — and who you are there to serve.
Top managers create the organisation’s goals, overall strategy and operating policies, and act as steward of its vision and mission. CEO, president, executive vice-president.
Middle managers implement the policies and plans developed above them, and supervise and coordinate the activities of lower-level managers. Plant manager, operations manager, division head. The largest group, and the one under pressure from both directions.
First-line managers supervise and coordinate the activities of operating employees. Supervisor, coordinator, office manager. Usually someone’s first management job, and usually filled by promoting someone out of the operating ranks — hold on to that, it returns in part 3.
15 secis how long a customer spends with the person who decides what your brand is
Jan Carlzon turned Scandinavian Airlines around by counting these encounters: roughly ten million passengers a year, five staff contacts each, about fifteen seconds apiece. He called them moments of truth, and concluded that SAS was created 50 million times a year, fifteen seconds at a time, by front-line employees no executive was standing next to.
Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth (1987)
The pyramid has been turned upside down
The traditional picture puts the boss on top, wielding unquestioned power. The contemporary view flips it: top executives support middle managers, middle managers support employees, and employees serve customers. The organisation exists to serve customers, so the structure exists to serve the people who face them.
Figure 2 · the same three levels, two claims about what they are forSame three tiers, opposite direction of service. The hierarchy does not disappear in the second picture — what changes is what it is for. The mechanism that makes the second one more than a drawing is empowerment.
EmpowermentThe process of enabling or authorizing an individual to think, behave, take action, and control work and decision-making in autonomous ways.Lecture 1
The classic example is deliberately small: a restaurant that lets any server give away a dessert to fix a bad experience, without asking anyone. No policy meeting, no escalation, and the customer comes back.
Figure 4 · what empowerment actually removesEmpowerment is not a mood, it is a removed round trip. The free dessert costs the same either way. The difference is four hops of delay and a customer who has now been told to wait.
Cutting the other way: functional managers
Level tells you how far up you sit. Function tells you what you are responsible for. Both labels apply to everyone.
Marketing — product development, distribution, pricing, promotion and communication.
Operations — the systems that create the product or service: production control, inventory, quality control, layout, supply chain.
Human resources — planning, recruiting and selection, training and development, compensation and benefits, appraisal, and discharging low performers.
Project — the planning, execution and closing of one specific project.
Administrative / general — Griffin’s addition: a generalist tied to no specialty, such as a store manager or business-unit head, rewarded on the whole unit rather than one function.
Figure 3 · level and function are different questionsNobody has only one label. Level and function are separate questions, and every manager answers both at once. Add line-or-staff and you have three labels for the same person — which is why “what kind of manager are you?” is never one word.
Line and staff
A line manager leads a team contributing directly to what the customer buys — the person responsible for the production, marketing and profitability of the Apple Watch. A staff manager leads a function that creates indirect inputs. Finance and accounting are critical, and nobody buys them. Critical and indirect at once: that is the entire political difficulty of being a staff manager.
Inventory is fundamentally evil. You kind of want to manage it like you’re in the dairy business. If it gets past its freshness date, you have a problem.Tim Cook, then Chief Operating Officer, Apple — on stock losing 1–2% of its value a week
That is an operations manager’s worldview in two sentences. Ask a marketing manager about inventory and you get a different answer, and neither is wrong — they are optimising different things. Most of what looks like conflict inside a company is functional managers doing their jobs correctly.
Lecture 1, slides 12–28 · Griffin ch. 1 · Carlzon, Moments of Truth (1987)
Part 3 of 8
Planning and organizing
Planning, organizing, leading, controlling — the P-O-L-C framework. Not four stages in a sequence, but four things a manager is doing at once, all week, forever. Here are the first two.
PlanningSetting an organisation’s goals and deciding how best to achieve them. Formally: the selection of short- and long-term objectives and the drawing up of tactical and strategic plans to achieve them.Lecture 1 · Barron’s Accounting Dictionary
An objective or goal is a desired end point, normally with a deadline.
A plan is an organised sequence of predetermined actions chosen to reach it.
Establishing objectives and measures is the first step. Not the vision, not the brainstorm — the measurable end point.
9 in 10major projects run over budget — and planning is still worth it
Bent Flyvbjerg’s database of megaprojects gives what he calls the iron law: over budget, over time, over and over again. Nine out of ten have cost overruns. Eisenhower had already given the reason a plan survives being wrong: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything” — what you keep is not the document but the thinking it forced.
Flyvbjerg, “What You Should Know About Megaprojects, and Why,” Project Management Journal (2014) · Eisenhower, 14 November 1957
Plans come at three altitudes, and each one turns the altitude above it into something you can act on. Strategic plans run three years or more and belong to top management. Tactical plans run one to three years and belong to middle managers. Operational plans run under a year and belong to everyone. The middle band is the one students leave out, and it is the one that makes the chain readable.
Figure 5 · one goal, three altitudesOne goal, three altitudes. If you cannot draw the line from the quarterly waste target back up to the sentence about trust, the plan has a gap in it somewhere — and that gap is usually where strategy quietly stops happening.
OrganizingThe process for accomplishing the goals identified in planning and structuring the work of the organisation — specifically, determining how activities and resources are to be grouped.Lecture 1 · Griffin ch. 1
Every organized human activity — from the making of pots to the placing of a man on the moon — gives rise to two fundamental and opposing requirements: the division of labor into various tasks to be performed, and the coordination of these tasks to accomplish the activity.Henry Mintzberg, Structure in Fives (1983)
45two-way relationships in a team of ten — and 105 in a team of fifteen
The number of pairs in a team of n people is n(n−1)/2, so coordination cost grows faster than the team does. Fred Brooks drew the practical conclusion in 1975: adding people to a late project makes it later. That curve is exactly the price Mintzberg says you pay for dividing the work.
Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
Divide, then coordinate. Every org chart ever drawn is somebody’s answer to that tension, and every reorganisation is somebody deciding the previous answer was wrong. Griffin warns explicitly against treating organizing as “drawing the chart” — the chart is the output, not the work.
Figure 6 · divide, and then pay to coordinateMintzberg’s two opposing requirements, drawn. Division of labour is the easy half; the arrows on the right are the half that costs. Every reorganisation you will ever sit through is an argument about where to set that balance.
The people who are doing the work are the moving force behind the Macintosh. My job is to create a space for them, to clear out the rest of the organization and keep it at bay.Steve Jobs
The two that depend on other people agreeing. Leading is conferred by the followers; controlling is impossible unless planning gave you a standard to measure against.
LeadingThe process through which an individual tries to influence another individual or a group of individuals to accomplish a goal. It implies that someone is willing to follow, and to confer power and status on another person.Lecture 1
The second sentence is the one people skip. Leading is not granted by the job title; it is conferred by the people doing the following. You can be appointed a manager. You cannot be appointed a leader.
Management and leadership are two different kinds of work
Griffin locates leading inside the manager’s role: “the set of processes used to get members of the organization to work together to further the interests of the organization.” John Kotter puts the two side by side instead: management is about coping with complexity — planning and budgeting, organizing and staffing, controlling and problem-solving — while leadership is about coping with change — setting a direction, aligning people, motivating them. Not two kinds of person; two kinds of work, and a serious job needs both. If an exam question asks whether a manager is automatically a leader, this is the distinction it is testing.
The art of leadership is saying no, not yes. It is very easy to say yes.Tony Blair
180teams Google studied before concluding that who is on a team matters less than how it behaves
Project Aristotle expected to find the winning mix of talent. Instead the strongest predictor of an effective team was psychological safety — whether people felt able to take a risk in front of each other. That is something a manager creates or destroys, which puts it squarely inside leading.
Google re:Work, “Understand team effectiveness” (Project Aristotle)
ControllingThe measure assuring conformity with an organization’s policies, procedures or standards — the final phase of the management process, needed to evaluate progress toward goals.Lecture 1
It breaks into three steps worth memorising: establish performance standards; compare actual performance against them; take corrective action when necessary. No standard means no control — which is why controlling depends entirely on planning having been done properly. And one caution: controlling in this sense is not control in the behavioural or manipulative sense. It is about the standard, not about watching people.
Figure 7 · the control cycle, and what it depends onNo standard, no control. Every arrow here starts from a number that planning had to produce first. That is the real dependency between the two functions, and it is why controlling cannot be “keeping an eye on people” — there would be nothing to compare against.
If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.Mario Andretti
4%The moment a standard becomes a target, it starts to lie to you
Set “waste under 4%” and you may get less waste — or you may get the same waste, recorded differently. Marilyn Strathern’s formulation of Goodhart’s law is the sentence to remember: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Controlling is not just running the loop; it is noticing when the loop is being gamed, which is why the fourth step sends you back to planning rather than to more measuring.
Strathern, “Improving ratings: audit in the British University system,” European Review (1997), after Goodhart (1975)
Figure 8 · why P-O-L-C is a circle and not a listThe return arrow is the whole point. If P-O-L-C were a line, an organisation would only ever get one plan. Griffin draws exactly this: solid arrows for the logical sequence, dotted ones because managers “move back and forth between the activities in unpredictable ways.”
The four functions say what management is for. Mintzberg’s ten roles say what a manager’s Tuesday actually contains. Both are examinable, and they are not rivals.
The ten roles
RoleAn organised set of behaviours.Mintzberg
The three groups are connected in a specific order, and saying so is worth marks: the interpersonal roles put the manager in a position to receive information; the informational roles link all managerial work together; the decisional roles make significant use of that information.
Figure 9 · the three groups are a sequence, not a listRead left to right and the three groups stop being a list to memorise. Interpersonal contact is what puts information in a manager’s hands; the informational roles move it; the decisional roles spend it.
Figurehead — social, ceremonial and legal duties. A top manager represents the company legally and socially outside it; a supervisor represents the work group to management and management back to the group.
Leader — defines the relationship between manager and employees, and manages the performance and responsibilities of the group.
Liaison — networking with contacts inside and outside. Top managers use it to gain favours and information; supervisors use it to keep the routine flow of work moving.
Monitor — seeks out and collects information about the organisation and the industry, and watches the team’s productivity and well-being.
Disseminator — transmits useful information into the organisation.
Spokesperson — transmits information about the organisation outward. The top manager is treated as an industry expert; the supervisor as a departmental one.
Entrepreneur — initiates and controls change: solving problems, generating ideas and implementing them.
Disturbance handler — deals with threats and unexpected roadblocks, and mediates disputes.
Resource allocator — decides where the organisation’s effort goes: funding, staff, everything else.
Negotiator — negotiates on behalf of the team, department or organisation.
Supervisory management is more focused and shorter-term, so the figurehead role matters less while disturbance handler and negotiator matter more. Leadership permeates every activity, which makes the leader role the most important one at every level.
What Mintzberg actually found — and it is not what the textbooks imply
The roles come from The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), built on structured observation of five chief executives for a week each. Mintzberg turned the findings into a Harvard Business Review article that set four pieces of “folklore” against the evidence. It is the single most useful thing you can read on what management is really like, and it is on this page as a tool — Myth Buster — because the numbers are more persuasive than any summary.
One number to remember
Half of the activities Mintzberg’s five chief executives engaged in lasted less than nine minutes. In a separate study, 56 US foremen averaged 583 activities per eight-hour shift — roughly one every 48 seconds. And 160 British managers worked uninterrupted for half an hour or more only about once every two days. Whatever the reflective, systematic planner of the textbooks is, it is not this.
5chief executives, one week each — the entire evidence base for the ten roles
Worth knowing before you cite it. Mintzberg’s 1973 study observed five American chief executives for one week apiece. The ten roles have held up across fifty years of replication, but the original sample is small enough that the honest sentence in an exam is “Mintzberg found”, never “research proves”. Checking what a claim actually rests on is the habit this course is really testing.
Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work (1973)
Figure 10 · one hour, to scaleThis is why the ten roles are worth more than the four functions when someone asks what a manager does. The functions describe the purpose of the job. This picture is the job.
Four tools cover this part
Role Grouper checks that you can place all ten roles in the right group in under three minutes. Role Detector walks through a chief executive’s Tuesday. Supervisor’s Wednesday runs the same ten roles one level down, where the weighting is completely different. Role Confusions is the hard one: ten situations where two roles both look right, and the four tests that separate them. If you only do one, do that one — it is where exam answers are won and lost.
Lecture 1, slides 60–70 · Mintzberg (1973); Mintzberg, “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact”, HBR (1975, reissued 1990)
Part 6 of 8
Skills of managers
Three skills, and everybody has all three. What changes with level is the mix — and the reason promotions go wrong is that the mix changes faster than the person does.
Three skills: technical, interpersonal, strategic. Everybody has all three. What changes with level is the mix — and the reason promotions go wrong is that the mix changes faster than the person does.
Technical — the ability to do the actual work. Write the code, read the accounts, pull the shot. This is what got you hired.
Interpersonal — working with, understanding and motivating people, individually and in groups.
Strategic — seeing the organisation whole: thinking abstractly, understanding how the parts fit, and how the organisation sits in its environment.
Where this comes fromRobert L. Katz, “Skills of an Effective Administrator”, Harvard Business Review, September 1974, 52(5), 90–102, published as an HBR Classic. Katz’s own words were technical, human and conceptual; your lecture uses technical, interpersonal and strategic. Same three skills — just do not mix the two vocabularies inside one answer.On the MNG304 reading list
Figure 11 · the mix, not the amountTechnical falls away, strategic climbs, interpersonal stays. The constant middle band is the part students get wrong most often — every level manages through other people, so the human skill never becomes less important.
7.5%worse, on average, is the manager you get by promoting your best salesperson
Economists tracked sales workers at 214 firms. Selling twice as much as a colleague made someone about 15% more likely to be promoted that month — and every doubling of pre-promotion sales predicted a 7.5% fall in how much their team improved afterwards. The skill being rewarded is not the skill being hired for.
Benson, Li & Shue, “Promotions and the Peter Principle,” Quarterly Journal of Economics (2019)
The promotion trap
The best developer on the team gets promoted to manage developers — and keeps doing the thing that made her the best developer, because it is what she is good at and what gets praised. The technical skill that earned the promotion is now the smallest part of the job. The strategic skill the job now needs is the one nobody trained her in. This is the most common way a good individual contributor becomes a bad manager.
Griffin names seven skills rather than three. Beyond technical, interpersonal and conceptual you meet diagnostic (visualising the most appropriate response to a situation), communication, decision-making and time management. Griffin also splits management into a science — rational, logical, objective, systematic — and an art of intuition, experience and personal insight, with technical and diagnostic skills serving the first and conceptual and interpersonal skills the second.
Does any of this hold up? Google tested it on 10,000 data points
Katz wrote in 1955. In 2008 Google ran Project Oxygen, an internal study that began from the opposite hypothesis — that managers might not matter at all — and analysed over 10,000 data points from performance reviews, feedback surveys and hundreds of pages of interview notes. The finding was that managers matter a great deal: teams with highly effective managers achieved better results, were happier, and had lower turnover. The study produced a list of behaviours of great managers:
Is a good coach
Empowers the team and does not micromanage
Creates an inclusive team environment, showing concern for success and well-being
Is productive and results-oriented
Is a good communicator — listens and shares information
Supports career development and discusses performance
Has a clear vision and strategy for the team
Has key technical skills to advise the team
Collaborates across the company
Is a strong decision maker
Read that list against Katz. Exactly one item is technical. Coaching, empowering, communicating and developing people are Katz’s human skill; vision, strategy and decision-making are his conceptual skill. A 1955 framework and a 2008 dataset from a company that did not want the answer end up in roughly the same place — which is about as good as evidence gets in management.
Figure 12 · ten behaviours, three skillsA 1955 framework and a 2008 dataset, landing in the same place. Google set out to test whether managers mattered at all. Nine of the ten behaviours it found are things Katz would have called human or conceptual — which is the strongest defence of the skill mix you can put in an exam answer.
Use this in an exam
“Katz’s categories are old” is a weak criticism, and examiners have heard it. “Katz’s categories were confirmed by Google’s Project Oxygen, which set out to show managers did not matter and found the opposite” is a strong sentence, and it takes four seconds to write.
Both get things done through other people. The difference is what they start with: a manager has resources and is looking for results; an entrepreneur has an opportunity and is looking for resources.
EntrepreneurshipThe recognition of opportunities — needs, wants, problems and challenges — and the use or creation of resources to implement innovative ideas for new, thoughtfully-planned ventures.MNG304 syllabus, topic 1 · Neck, Neck & Murray (2018)
Read it again. It says process, not idea. Having a good idea is not the hard part — somebody has to convert it into action, and that conversion is the entrepreneurship. Everyone you know has had a startup idea. That is not what the word describes.
Figure 13 · one extra step, and everything else follows from itOne extra box, and the risk, the horizon and the reward all change with it. Everything in the table below is a consequence of the entrepreneur having to acquire what the manager was handed.
Opportunities are problems in search of solutions
And the best opportunities are big problems in search of big solutions, because a bigger problem means a bigger market for whatever solves it. This is the sentence the second half of your course is built on. When you reach opportunity discovery in topic 06, you will be looking for problems, not for ideas.
45.0is the mean age of the founders of the fastest-growing new US ventures
Administrative data on the whole US firm population puts the mean founding age of the top 1-in-1,000 fastest-growing start-ups at 45.0 years. Prior experience in the specific industry predicted success far better than youth did. The garage-dropout story is a story.
Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda, “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship,” American Economic Review: Insights (2020)
What is the same
Both work through other people. Neither does the work personally for long.
Both carry out all four functions. An entrepreneur plans, organises, leads and controls — often before lunch, and with nobody to delegate to.
Entrepreneur is one of Mintzberg’s ten managerial roles. Initiating and controlling change is part of the manager’s job description, not an alternative to it.
What is different
Manager
Entrepreneur
Starting point
Resources already exist; deploy them well
An opportunity exists; the resources must be found or created
Main enemy
Inefficiency and drift
Uncertainty — the customer may not exist
Time horizon
The plan, the quarter, the year
Survival until the next piece of evidence
Who carries the risk
Mostly the organisation
Frequently the person, personally
Reward
Salary, bonus, position
Ownership of the upside — and the downside
Cost of being wrong
A missed target
The venture
Entrepreneurial managers are the overlap: people inside an existing organisation who behave entrepreneurially — spotting opportunities, testing them, creating value with resources they do not yet control. Topic 05 opens exactly here.
A map of the whole module
Management principles are drawn from four fields, and the list doubles as a map of MNG304. Psychology explains how individuals actually behave. Leadership answers who takes the organisation forward. Entrepreneurship answers what it should be for. Strategy answers how it will win, over years rather than weeks.
MNG304 syllabus, topic 1 · Neck, Neck & Murray, Entrepreneurship: The Practice and Mindset (2018) · Drucker, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (1985)
Part 8 of 8
What this is built from
1Lecture 1, Slides1.pdf. Žemaitis, E. MNG304.
2Griffin, R. W. (2016). Fundamentals of Management, 8th ed. Cengage. Ch. 1.
3Robbins, S. P., Coulter, M. & Long, D. (2024). Management, 16th ed. Pearson. Ch. 1.
4Fayol, H. (1916). Administration industrielle et générale. Translated as General and Industrial Management (1949).
5Katz, R. L. (1974). “Skills of an Effective Administrator.” Harvard Business Review, 52(5), 90–102.
6Mintzberg, H. (1973). The Nature of Managerial Work. Harper & Row.
7Mintzberg, H. “The Manager’s Job: Folklore and Fact.” Harvard Business Review (1975; reissued as an HBR Classic, March–April 1990).
8Mintzberg, H. (1983). Structure in Fives. Prentice-Hall. · (2009) Managing. Berrett-Koehler.
9Chandler, A. D. (1962). Strategy and Structure. MIT Press.
10Drucker, P. F. (1963). “Managing for Business Effectiveness.” HBR. · (1985) Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
11Brooks, F. P. (1975). The Mythical Man-Month. Addison-Wesley.
12Grove, A. S. (1983). High Output Management. Random House.
13Carlzon, J. (1987). Moments of Truth. Ballinger.
14Kotter, J. P. (1990). “What Leaders Really Do.” Harvard Business Review.
15Bennis, W. (1997). Managing People Is Like Herding Cats.
16Strathern, M. (1997). “‘Improving ratings’: audit in the British University system.” European Review, 5(3) — the modern phrasing of Goodhart’s law.
17Flyvbjerg, B. (2014). “What You Should Know About Megaprojects, and Why.” Project Management Journal, 45(2).
18Gallup (2015). State of the American Manager: Analytics and Advice for Leaders.
19Neck, H. M., Neck, C. P. & Murray, E. L. (2018). Entrepreneurship: The Practice and Mindset. SAGE.
20Benson, A., Li, D. & Shue, K. (2019). “Promotions and the Peter Principle.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 134(4), 2085–2134.
21Azoulay, P., Jones, B., Kim, J. D. & Miranda, J. (2020). “Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship.” American Economic Review: Insights, 2(1), 65–82.
22Google re:Work. Project Oxygen — “Following the data: the research behind great managers.” · Project Aristotle — “Understand team effectiveness.”