Principles of Business Management: Concepts, Functions and Contemporary Practice for the Modern Enterprise

Every society is, in the end, an organised society. Hospitals treat patients, universities teach students, factories convert steel into machines, start-ups convert ideas into services, and governments convert taxes into public goods. None of these outcomes is produced by resources alone. Each is produced by the deliberate act of combining resources — human, financial, physical and informational — so that the whole achieves what the parts, working separately, could never achieve. That deliberate act is management.
This book is written for the student who is meeting management as a formal field of study for the first time, and for the practising supervisor or entrepreneur who has been managing for years without ever having examined the principles behind the practice. It is designed for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in commerce, business administration, engineering management, hotel and hospital administration, and for the management papers of competitive and professional examinations. The vocabulary is deliberately plain; the ideas are not diluted.
The approach of this book
Three convictions have shaped every chapter.
First, principles matter more than fashions. Management literature is unusually vulnerable to fashion. Techniques arrive with great excitement, are adopted by imitation rather than analysis, and quietly disappear. Underneath them, however, lies a stable body of principles — division of work, unity of command, delegation with accountability, the necessity of feedback, the human need for meaning and recognition — that has survived every change of fashion since Fayol first wrote them down. This book teaches the principles and then shows how each generation of techniques expresses them.
Second, management is a practice, not merely a body of knowledge. A principle that cannot be applied is an ornament. Every chapter therefore contains worked illustrations, numerical examples, decision situations, feature boxes drawn from manufacturing, services, agriculture, the public sector and the digital economy, a full-length case study, and a project or field assignment that sends the reader out of the classroom and into a real organisation. Students who complete the sixteen project assignments in this book will have built, by the end of the course, a small portfolio of primary field research on managerial practice.
Third, management is a moral activity. A manager's decisions distribute rewards and burdens among people who did not choose the manager and often cannot resist the decision. Ethics, therefore, is not a supplementary chapter tacked on at the end; questions of fairness, safety, honesty and social responsibility appear throughout, and are treated systematically in Chapter 3 and revisited in Chapters 9, 13 and 15.
Structure of the book
The sixteen chapters are grouped into six parts. Part I establishes what management is, how managerial thought evolved from the workshop floor of the nineteenth century to the algorithmic enterprise of today, and how the environment shapes managerial choice. Parts II to V follow the classical sequence of managerial functions — planning and decision making, organising and staffing, directing, and controlling — because that sequence remains the most reliable teaching architecture yet devised. Part VI turns to globalisation, digital technology, sustainability and entrepreneurship, where the principles of the earlier parts are tested against the conditions of the present decade.
Chapters may be taught in the order given or re-sequenced. Instructors working to a two-semester scheme commonly take Parts I to III in the first semester and Parts IV to VI in the second. Those teaching a single-semester survey course may treat Chapters 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13 as the core and use the remaining chapters as reading assignments.