Assignment 1 individually

Write a 3-5 pages essay on what business and management education should teach to undergraduates to become successful managers in an international environment. In his article Moon Shots for Management, written for Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel states that anyone who really cares about management should aim high, have courage because great accomplishments start with great aspirations, find new ways to motivate, inspire and mobilize the entire organization. If in the past students were happy to codify the best practices, now its time to look beyond them. In the article, there are suggested 25 moon shots which could be integrated by the pioneers of tomorrow, us, the undergraduates, into the management strategy, so as the entire society benefit from them. Nowadays, the term management has been replaced by the term leadership, everyone wants to be a great leader, but the key to success is to combine them. Young managers must focus on the achievement of social goals and nobles actions more than on the shareholders; they should pay more attention to their emotions, reduce fear and increase trust, leave behind the old pyramid hierarchy, give them more power, thereby the flows of information go quicker and directly to the persons involved. Of course these measures are encouraging and help creating create a nicer and a more productive working place. Also, in order to become successful managers, scholars are required to be innovative, creative, easy and adaptable to changes. Business and management education should teach them about social responsibility which goes beyond making profits to include protecting and improving societys welfare. A successful manager nowadays has to be employee oriented as he is associated with high group productivity and high job satisfaction; he should inspire support for new ideas, build support, overcome resistance, and ensure that innovations are implemented. The organic organization is preferred to mechanistic organization (with a tight, rigid controlled structure) as it has a more flexible and adaptable structure. The aspects that define this new organizational structure are the following: the non-standardized jobs, the fluid-based structure, the little direct supervision, the minimal formal rules, the open communication network and the empowered employees. As the author says the aim of Management 2.0 is to make companies more human- people are adaptable: go back to school for new qualification, change their job; people are innovative: create new recipes, redecorate their home; people are community minded: they volunteer for different causes. Our world needs the energy, the vitality, the ingenuity and the sense of kinship, qualities that are inside the future becoming successful managers.

Another source of inspiration for successful management practice, would be the article The Five Minds of a Manager. Here are presented or suggested some priceless ideas that should be adopted and implemented in a management plan, for example how they should combine action with reflection, with collaboration and with worldliness. The future managers need to be thought to aspire to a worldly mindset rather than a conformist global view. Global means compliance, conformist, everyone has the same beliefs, styles and values. On the other hand, worldly means contemporary, modern. Also, the term worldly is defined by The Oxford Dictionary as experienced in life, sophisticated, practical, which is an interesting mixture of words. Organizations dont need people who see in everything only reactions of their own behavior, neither managers who cant see beyond images in front of them. Managers need to stop and reflect at: causes( What factors are contributing to progress?/ What is holding us back from further progress?), solutions( What do we need to do differently?/ What support do we need to be able to do this?), outcomes( What progress are we making towards achieving out goal?/ Where are we struggling?). Reflection is an active process, which involves the examination of past experiences and gaining some conclusions that can inform future activities. Every company has its own personality or culture. For an organization to be successful over the long term, its culture needs t be managed effectively. Managers need to be able to understand and use cultural concepts to manage different work groups, to handle organizational change and to operate in the international marketplace. Most managers find it difficult to handle formal models of organizational culture because they lack exposure to the disciplines whose paradigms structure such models and because they lack a language and practice in discussing cultural concepts in the workplace. Also, it may be more effective to teach managers about culture using an educational paradigm which focuses on experience than one focusing on the transmission of knowledge. Students should be thought about collaborative management style which is used to describe various management techniques that promote a sense of unity and teamwork among managers and supervisors within a business organization. The idea of this style is to allow managers to combine their strengths with the strengths of other members of the team, making it possible to collectively offset any weaknesses that may be found among the team members. This way, the process is more efficient and has a positive influence on the employees morale, on the vendor relationships and even on customers perception of the business. Human resources management is essential for an organization to work properly; the future managers will have to learn how to select, train and evaluate work force. Also human resources management has an important strategic role, as it helps establish an organizations sustainable advantage, and it adds value to the firm, as high performance in work practices lead to both high individual and high organizational performance. Managers need to be sure that they have the right number and kinds of people in the right places, at the right time, people able to do effectively and efficiently their tasks. A series of tests for the future employees are good idea; such tests could be intelligence tests, aptitude tests, attitude tests, ability tests or interest tests,

this being useful in forming the right team, the right environment to perform certain actions. Of course, no discrimination is allowed. Managers should take into consideration the big-five model which is characterized by extraversion (sociable, talkative, assertive), agreeableness (good-natured, cooperative, trusting), conscientiousness ( responsible, dependable, persistent, achievement oriented), emotional stability ( calm, enthusiastic, secure), openness to experience ( imaginative, artistically sensitive, intellectual). The level of self-esteem is also important; the persons with a high level of selfesteem tend to be more satisfied with their jobs than others with a low level of self-esteem, believe in themselves and expect success and take more risks and use unconventional approaches. On the other hand, the persons with a low self-esteem level are more susceptible to external influences and depend on positive evaluations from others. Not all people can be managers. Job selection depends on everybodys personality-it must be taken into account that there are differences in personalities, there are different kinds of jobs and the fact that the job satisfaction and turnover are related to the match between personality and job for an individual. For example a manager has as personality charactieristics the following: selfconfident, ambitious, energetic, and why not, domineering and prefers activities in which there are opportunities to influence others and maybe, attain power. It is clearly different from an artistic spirit, which is idealistic, emotional, disorderly, with unsystematic activities and ambiguous. A manager can be a behavioral shaper: it attempts to model individuals by guiding them in steps, so they learn to behave in certain ways beneficial for the organization. It could be done by positive reinforcement( reward desired behavior), negative reinforcement, punishment( penalize an undesired behavior) or extinction. Of course that there are differences between generations that need to be taken into consideration. All in all, management should be taught in a dynamic and unforgettable manner. The organization of classes should incorporate aspects that should be done before classes, during classes, after classes, between classes in order to attract and raise interest. Some interesting teaching techniques that could be used are: role playing, discussions, study cases, experiential methods, anecdotes, stories from real life. Also, the enthusiasm of the teacher in engaging his students is an advantage in implementing contemporary and inspiring future methods. And after reading those two inspiring articles, I got to the conclusion that The 25 Moon Shots for Management is an ambitious list, that presents a lot of ideas that serve one goal, granted with many, many smaller ones, and that the second article The Five Minds of a Manager is one of those timeless, classic pieces. The authors suggest that the article should be perceived by the reader as a set of attitudes that open new possibilities. Mixing those articles and adding a personal touch, will definitely attract students to these new practices in a pleasant way.