2. From the text write out: a) five managerial challenges;

b) major steps in control;

c) types of control;

d) basic approaches to control;

e) characteristics of effective control systems.

1. Read text 7. Text 7. Acquiring Management Skills

How does one acquire the skills necessary to become a successful man­ager? The most common path, although there are as many variations as there are managers, is the one taken by Donald Petersen of Ford. He combined a formal education with a variety of experiences to develop and refine his management skills. Some managers use their education as a springboard; others rely more on their experience to get the job done. On balance, however, most successful managers use both sources in some proportion to acquire their technical, interpersonal, conceptual, diagnostic, and analytic skills.

You are acquiring management skills in an educational setting. When you com­plete the course, you will have a foundation for devel­oping your management skills in more advanced courses.

Enrollments in business schools and colleges have mushroomed in recent years. More and more students are seeking undergraduate de­grees in business and management. M.B.A. programs (conferring master's degrees in business administration) have also experienced rapid growth, and they often attract students whose undergraduate majors were in other fields.

Even after obtaining the degree, most prospective managers have not seen the end of their management education. Many middle and top managers periodically return to campus to participate in executive or management development programs (MDPs) ranging in duration from a few days to several weeks. First-line managers also take advantage of extension and continuing education programs offered by institutions of higher education. A recent innovation in extended management edu­cation is the Executive M.B.A. program offered by many top business schools. Under this system, middle and top managers with several years of experience complete an accelerated program of study on week­ends. Finally, many large companies have in-house training programs for furthering the education of managers.

Formal programs of study in business and management are relatively new. During the first several decades of this century, few successful managers attended college, and those who did usually majored in the humanities or liberal arts. About the closest a person could get to a business degree was to study economics. Even today, some successful executives lack college degrees.

The current trend, however, is clearly toward formal education as a prerequisite to business success. Non-business undergraduates have re­cently begun to take more and more business courses in an effort to increase their job opportunities. Engineers frequently return to school for M.B.A. degrees. Today, virtually all of this country's top executives have one or more degrees. And the rest of the world is catching up.

The primary advantage of education as a source of management skills is that a student can follow a well-developed program of study, becom­ing familiar with current research and thinking on management. And many college students can devote full-time energy and attention to learning. On the negative side, management education may have to be very general to meet the needs of a wide variety of students, and specific know-how may be hard to obtain.

Even if you were to memorize every word in every management book ever written, you could not automatically step into a top-management position and be effective. The reason? Management skills must also be learned through experience. Most managers advanced to their present position from other jobs. By experiencing the day-to-day pressures a manager faces and by meeting a variety of managerial challenges, the individual develops insights that cannot be learned from a book.

For this reason most large companies, and many smaller ones as well, have management training programs developed for their prospective managers. People are hired from college campuses, from other organ­izations, or from the ranks of the organization's first-line managers and operating employees. These people are systematically assigned to a variety of jobs. Over time, the individual is exposed to most, if not all, of the major aspects of the organization. In this way the manager learns by experience.

The training programs at certain companies, such as Procter & Gam­ble, General Foods, and General Mills, are so good that some recruiters think of them as a second M.B.A. About half of the people who make it through the General Mills program, for example, use this experience to secure good jobs with other companies.

Even without formal training programs, it is possible for managers to achieve success as they profit from varied experiences. For example, the president of the NBC television network, Robert C. Wright, prac­ticed law and worked in manufacturing, sales, and finance. Of course, natural ability, drive, and self-motivation also play roles in acquiring experience and developing management skills.

Most effective managers learn their skills through a combination of education and experience. Some type of college degree, even if it is not in business administration, usually provides a foundation. The individual then participates in an initial job experience and subsequently progresses through a variety of manage­ment situations. During the manager's rise in the organization, occa­sional education "updates," such as management development programs, may supplement on-the-job experience.