abhishreshthaa
Abhijeet S
Managing: Science or Art?
- Managing, like all other practices - whether medicine, music composition, engineering, accountancy, or even baseball-is an art.
- It is know-how. It is doing things in the light of the realities of a situation.
- Yet managers can work better by using the organized knowledge about management.
- It is this knowledge that constitutes a science.
- Thus, managing as practice may be referred to as a science. In this context science and art are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary.
- As science improves, so should art, as has happened in the physical and biological sciences.
- To be sure, the science underlying managing is fairly crude and inexact.
- This is true because the many variables with which managers deal are extremely complex.
- Nevertheless, such management knowledge can certainly improve managerial practice. Physician without the
- advantage of science would be little more than witch doctors.
- Executives who attempt to manage without management science must trust to luck, intuition, or what they did in the past.
- In managing, as in any other field, unless practitioners are to learn by trial and error (and it has been said that mangers’ errors are their subordinates’ trails), there is no place they can turn for meaningful guidance other than the accumulated knowledge underlying their practice.
- Contributions in management have come from the intellectuals with widely different background and these contributions have not suitably and adequately integrated to give a unified theory of management.
- Rather with the development of management thought over the period of time various approaches for managerial analysis have been developed.
- These approaches are widely known as approaches or patterns of managerial analysis or schools of management thought.