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Idea  38 - Scientific management Is management and art or a science? The debate is not new, nor is it over. In recent times, the 'art' lobby has been making up some lost ground, but it was 19th-century engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor who first cast management as a science. Peter Drucker, the management guru's management guru, says Taylor deserves a place alongside Darwin and Freud in the making of the modern world. Taylor believed that production was subject to universal laws that were independent of human judgment. It was the task of scientific management to uncover these laws, to discover the 'one best way' of doing things. It might be the best way of shoveling coal, of securing a bolt or of ensuring quality control. Taylor is largely forgotten outside business schools these days. When his memory surfaces, it's often for the worst of reasons. He was the first to break work down into small pieces, measure them and put them back together so they opera

Idea  37 - Project management There are more lawyers, accountants and business school graduates in top management these days, and fewer engineers. The engineer as business manager is in eclipse, along with the shrinking weight of manufacturing in developed economies. Yet there is much that managers can and do learn from the down-and-dirty business of project management, in planning complex projects and forcing them through to conclusion. A project is very different to a process. A process carries out the same function again and again to yield a product or a service. A project is a one- off undertaking, with a clear beginning and end, usually aimed at creating some useful change or adding value - typically to build a new plant or create a new product. The skills needed to complete a project successfully are not those required to manage a process, and so project management has evolved as a discipline of its own. Projects bring together resources such as people, money and m

Idea  36 - Outsourcing In 2003, Procter &: Gamble caused a few jaws to drop by outsourcing its IT functions to Hewlett-Packard, its human resources department to IBM and its facilities management to Jones Lang LaSalle. It reasoned that specialists in each process would be able to beef up efficiency and service. Not only has it not been disappointed, but it has been pleasantly surprised at the scale of the improvement. So far, the exercise has been a classic example of why management reaches for outsourcing. Not all outsourcing fits that description, by any means. Many who have tried it say it is very difficult to pull off, and the failure rate remains high - anything from 40-70%, depending on whom you ask. A series of very visible outsourcing calamities at big companies like Dell and Lehman Brothers (which re-insourced helpdesks) and JP Morgan (which clawed back its IT functions) raised doubts over whether the practice had a future at all. Certain British government agen

Idea  35 - Organizational excellence Many esoteric works on management never make it past the campus gates. Others can influence the way companies are organized and run, though they usually have to filter their way through the consultancy profession first. A limited number of management books deliver an idea that's gripping enough to be read by senior management itself, drinking directly from the source. But only one has single-handedly created a whole new industry - In Search of Excellence, by McKinsey consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman. You could say that the book created two new industries: the mass business book industry and the Tom Peters industry. It appeared like a torch of hope to a benighted corporate America that felt it had lost its way in the dark. Battered by competition from the most unlikely source, in markets they had dominated proudly only a few years before, American managers reached for Peters and Waterman like a cartoon man-en-knees-in-desert

Idea 34  -  Mergers and acquisitions The hostile takeover is about as exhilarating as it gets up at head office. It's the chief executive suite as campaign tent, complete with hurrying advisers, councils-of-war and swift- changing tactics. For leaders who favor the military style, this is as close as it gets to being a real general - the plan, the strike, the capitulation and the prize. Sadly for them, the hostile bid is becoming less fashionable, but acquisition remains a perfectly reasonable, if usually less dramatic, strategic option for companies of all kinds. Mergers and acquisitions - 'M&A' in investment-banker speak - attract more public attention than anything a big company does except, perhaps, firing half the workforce or going bust. Typically, they happen when one company acquires all the assets and liabilities of another. Is there a difference between a merger and an acquisition? Not very often. A true merger is a marriage of equals in which sh