Questions: Questions about …

Question: What is Corporate Culture?
Answer: Corporate culture refers to a company’s values, beliefs, business principles, traditions, ways of operating, and internal work environment. There are different questions that need to be considered to fully understand its meaning in business life.
How might corporate culture be packaged?
The company’s beliefs, norms and values must be effectively packaged. The corporate culture must be embedded into everyday fabric of the business. It must inform individuals how things are done. It can come in different forms like stories which may help to explain current practices of business. Stories may be used to communicate importance of something in business. Symbols and slogans can also be used as a means of communicating firm’s culture. Mission statement often contains information about company’s culture.
How might corporate culture be communicated?
The corporate culture of the business must be communicated to employees and other stakeholders. Formal and informal methods can be used to do this. Formal methods are highly visible, consciously designed, regular events and activities. Rites and occasions can be planned to show different aspects of culture. Courses such as induction, orientation and training courses which have the values and beliefs communicated within the firm. Informal way involves the way in which employees communicate and express themselves in the business

Question: What is organizing?
Answer: As we know, the most important function of management is planning.
A key issue in accomplishing the goals identified in the planning process is structuring the work of the organization. Organizations are groups of people, with ideas and resources, working toward common goals. The purpose of the organizing function is to make the best use of the organization’s resources to achieve organizational goals. Output of organizing process is a set of organizational charts, organizational units. This process is also known as departmentalization.

Organizing can be viewed as the activities to collect and configure resources in order to implement plans in a highly effective and efficient fashion. Organizing is a broad set of activities, and often considered one of the major functions of management. Therefore, there are a wide variety of topics in organizing.

Question of Organizing Effectively in Management
Answer:  Effective organizing must first consider basic mission and long-range objectives established for the organization and the strategy. There are a lot of activities to be considered in organizing. A good manager starts with first the most inportant activities for success (aka key activities).
 

For an effective organizing, we must find these key activities. How do we find these key activities then?

You can ask three questions to identify key activities

1. In what area is excellence required to obtain the company’s objectives?
2. In what areas would lack of performance endanger the results?
3. What are the values that are truly important to us in this company?

Pareto analysis is a widely known method for such a process. Questions regarding Pareto analysis will be answered in another entry.

Question: What does organizing in management involve?

Answer:

Organizing involves following:-
1. Identification and Classification of Required Activities
2. Grouping of Activities to Obtain Objectives
3. Assignment of a manager to each group with the authority
4. Provision for Coordination horizontally and vertically

1. Identification and Classification of Required Activities
Activities, or business processes are set of interrelated activities which take business inputs, transform them to outputs by consuming, adding values. This process of transformation is affected by controls (policies, procedures, regulations etc) and realized by means of resources available (human resources, equipment, capital etc). In modern businesses, we have thousands of activities. The first step in organizing is to identify and classify required activities to achieve organizational objectives set in the planning function of management. A wise manager will start first with key activities.

2. Grouping of Activities to Obtain Objectives

Similar activities are grouped in this step. After grouping, we have activities as such production activities, design activities, marketing activities, sales activities, financial activities etc. When grouping the activities, the contribution of a certain activity toward the achievement of organizational objectives and significance, and interrelations with other activities are considered.

3. Assignment of a manager to each group with the authority
A specific management level is assigned for every group of activity from first-level, middle level, and top level management. Then an appropriate manager style is assigned for each group. Please note that at this step there is no human resource assignment. We only assign the manager as a styleship to effectively and efficiently manage a certain group of activity.

4. Provision for Coordination horizontally and vertically
At the last step, the relationships as horizontal and vertical are defined between different activity groups. The responsibilities, delegations, authorities should be well defined in this step.