Riassunti topics inglese

What is management?

Management is the running of an organisation or part of it. Management has two main components: an organisational skill, including the ability to delegate, and an entrepreneurial sense. The organisational skill is taught at colleges and business schools. The entrepreneurial sense is a personal skill (it cannot be taught). The entrepreneurial sense is the ability of recognising and making use of opportunities, and predicting market needs and trends.

Management is also the process of optimising human, material and financial contributions for the achievement of organisational goals. Managers are responsible for the process of planning, organising, leading and controlling the efforts of organisation members and of using all organisational resources to achieve stated organisational goals.

Different types of company structure

• Chain of command. All the people in the organisation know what decisions they are able to make, who their line manager is, and who their immediate subordinates are.
• Functional structure. Large organisations are often divided in departments (finance, marketing, production, etc.) because they are too complicated to be organised in a single hierarchy. A disadvantage is that people are often more concerned with the success of their own department than that of the company as a whole (conflict between departments).
• Flattening hierarchies and delegating responsibilities. This means to reduce the chain of command and take out layers of management, making the organisation much flatter. This type of company structure is used by managers in large businesses who want to motivate their staff.
• Matrix management. In this type, people report to more than one superior. It can become complex.
• Teams. A group is responsible for an entire project, and it is split up as soon as it is successfully completed. A team requires a strong leader.

Wikinomics

This word means collaborating with people outside the traditional corporate structure, letting people around the world cooperate to improve an operation or solve a problem, and paying them for their ideas. Wikinomics is based on 4 ideas: openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally. Don Tapscott is the inventor of this word, and he wrote a book about it (Wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything).

Recruitment stages

• When an employee gives notice, a company has to examine the job description for the post, to see whether it needs to be changed (or needs to be filled).
• If the company decides to replace the person, it establishes whether there is an internal candidate who could be moved to that job.
• If there is no internal candidate, the company can hire an employment agency, or advertise the vacancy.
• Then, it receives applications, CVs and covering letters, and makes a shortlist.
• It invites the shortlisted candidates for an interview, and makes a final selection.
• Eventually, it writes to all the other candidates to inform them that they have been unsuccessful.

Job applications

If you want to apply for a job, you have to look in the situations vacant pages of a newspaper, or a jobs website on the internet. Then, you have to make an application, send your CV