The Function of Management Is to Produce Results
Above all management is responsible for producing results.
Management has to give direction to the institution it manages. It has to think through the institution’s mission, has to set its objectives, and has to organize resources for the results the institution has to contribute. Management is, indeed, J.B. Say’s “entrepreneur” and responsible for directing vision and resources toward greatest results and contributions.
In performing these essential functions, management everywhere faces the same problems. It has to organize work for productivity; it has to lead the worker toward productivity and achievement. It is responsible for the social impact of its enterprise. Above all, it is responsible for producing the results – whether economic performance,, student learning, or patient care – for the sake of which each institution exists.
ACTION POINT: Is your organization delivering the results it should? If not, articulate your mission.
Management: The Central Social Function
Non economic institutions need a yardstick that does for them what profitability does for business.
Non business institutions flock in increasing number to business management to learn from it how to manage themselves. The hospital, the armed service, the Catholic diocese, the civil service – all want to go to school for business management.
This does not mean that business management can be transferred to other, non business institutions. On the contrary, the first thing these institutions have to learn from business management is that management begins with the setting of objectives and that, therefore, non economic institutions, such as a university or a hospital, will also need very different management from that of a business. But these institutions are right in seeing, is simply the first of the species and the one we have studied the most intensively. Non economic institutions need a yardstick that does for them what profitability does for the business. “Profitability,” in other words, rather than being the “exemption” and distinct from “human” or “social” needs, emerges, in the pluralist society of organizations, as the prototype of the measurement needed every institution in order to be managed and manageable.
ACTION POINT: What is the important non business institution with which you are associated? Does it use a specific yardstick to assess performance? How successful is the organization?
“Be careful about reading health books. Some fine day you’ll die of a misprint.”
Markus Herz
“Keep your best wishes, close to your heart and watch what happens”
Tony DeLiso
“Cakes are healthy too, you just eat a small slice.”
Mary Berry
“Top 15 Things Money Can’t Buy
Time. Happiness. Inner Peace. Integrity. Love. Character. Manners. Health. Respect. Morals. Trust. Patience. Class. Common sense. Dignity.”
Roy T. Bennett
“A fit, healthy body—that is the best fashion statement”
Jess C. Scott
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“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Hippocrates
“The individual who says it is not possible should move out of the way of those doing it.”
Tricia Cunningham
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
Kurt Vonnegut
“One rarely falls in love without being as much attracted to what is interestingly wrong with someone as what is objectively healthy.”
Alain de Botton
“You are not a mistake. You are not a problem to be solved. But you won’t discover this until you are willing to stop banging your head against the wall of shaming and caging and fearing yourself. (p. 84)”
Geneen Roth
“Healthy citizens are the greatest asset any country can have.”
Winston S. Churchill
“Happiness is part of who we are. Joy is the feeling”
Tony DeLiso
“Money cannot buy health, but I’d settle for a diamond-studded wheelchair.”
Dorothy Parker
“If we are creating ourselves all the time, then it is never too late to begin creating the bodies we want instead of the ones we mistakenly assume we are stuck with.”
Deepak Chopra
“Don’t destroy yourself by allowing negative people add gibberish and debris to your character, reputation, and aspirations. Keep all dreams alive but discreet, so that those with unhealthy tongues won’t have any other option than to infest themselves with their own diseases.”
Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign
“An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate.”
Criss Jami
“Elsewhere the paper notes that vegetarians and vegans (including athletes) ‘meet and exceed requirements’ for protein. And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggests that excess animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones in the urinary tract, and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption than omnivores. “
Jonathan Safran Foer
“Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it. (p. 163)”
Geneen Roth
“I am not my body. My body is nothing without me.”
Tom Stoppard
“I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.”
Mark Twain
“Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“The First wealth is health.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Whenever I see an ambulance, I like to think there is a baby being born, rather than a death.”
Phil Lester