Chapter 1

Introduction

Why Is There So Much Bad Management?

The initial problem is that lots of people in business still don’t know what management is, and, of course, this makes it impossible to go further and understand what good management is.

The worst culprits are those who try to convince you that management is just common sense and “do it yourself” abilities that they claim to possess partly from intuition and partly from their past experience. If this were so, then the world of teaching and research could be largely regarded as a waste of time. Most, however, will probably say that management is a combination of topics such as marketing, finance, logistics, and so on, whereas in fact these are only (departmental) management functions ...

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