Principles of Management

There has been a shift in emphasis from management to leadership in modern organizations, with the roles overlapping. This text will refresh your memory about the role of managers within the organization and distinguish them from the role of the leaders who inspire action.

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy

Synchronizing Leadership, Entrepreneurship, and Strategy

You know that leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategy are the inspiration for important, valuable, and useful principles of management. Now you will want to understand how they might relate to one another. In terms of principles of management, you can think of leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategic management as answering questions about "who," "what," and "how". Leadership helps you understand who helps lead the organization forward and what the critical characteristics of good leadership might be. Entrepreneurial firms and entrepreneurs in general are fanatical about identifying opportunities and solving problems – for any organization, entrepreneurship answers big questions about "what" an organization's purpose might be. Finally, strategic management aims to make sure that the right choices are made – specifically, that a good strategy is in place – to exploit those big opportunities.

One way to see how leadership, entrepreneurship, and strategy come together for an organization – and for you – is through a recent (disguised) job posting from Craigslist. Look at the ideal candidate characteristics identified in the Help Wanted ad – you don't have to look very closely to see that if you happen to be a recent business undergrad, then the organization depicted in the ad is looking for you. The posting identifies a number of areas of functional expertise for the target candidate. You can imagine that this new position is pretty critical for the success of the business. For that reason, we hope you are not surprised to see that, beyond functional expertise, this business seeks someone with leadership, entrepreneurial, and strategic orientation and skills. Now you have a better idea of what those key principles of management involve.


Help Wanted – Chief of Staff

We're hiring a chief of staff to bring some order to the mayhem of our firm's growth. You will touch everything at the company, from finance to sales, marketing to operations, recruiting to human resources, accounting to investor relations. You will report directly to the CEO.

Here's what you're going to be asked to do across a range of functional areas in the first 90 days, before your job evolves into a whole new set of responsibilities:

Marketing
  • Leverage our existing customer base using best-in-class direct marketing campaigns via email, phone, Web, and print or mail communications.
  • Convert our current customer spreadsheet and database into a highly functional, lean customer relationship management (CRM) system – we need to build the infrastructure to service and reach out to customers for multiple users.
  • Be great at customer service personally – excelling in person and on the phone, and you will help us build a Ninja certification system for our employees and partners to be like you.
  • Build our Web-enabled direct sales force, requiring a lot of strategic work, sales-force incentive design and experimentation, and rollout of Web features to support the direct channel.
Sales
  • Be great at demonstrating our product in the showroom, as well as at your residence and in the field – plan to be one of the top sales reps on the team (and earn incremental variable compensation for your efforts).
Finance and Accounting
  • Build our financial and accounting structures and processes, take over QuickBooks, manage our team of accountants, hire additional resources as needed, and get that profit and loss statement (P&L) rocking.
  • Figure out when we should pay our bills and manage team members to get things paid on time and manage our working capital effectively.
  • Track our actual revenues and expenses against your own projection – you will be building and running our financial model.
Operations
  • We are building leading-edge capabilities on returns, exchanges, and shipping – you will help guide strategic thinking on operational solutions and will implement them with our operations manager.
  • We are looking for new headquarters, you may help identify, build out, and launch.
HR and Recruiting
  • We are recruiting a team of interns – you will take the lead on the program, and many or all of them will report to you; you will be an ombudsman of sorts for our summer program.
  • The company has a host of HR needs that are currently handled by the CEO and third parties; you will take over many of these.
Production and Product Development
  • The company is actively recruiting a production assistant/manager – in the meanwhile, there are a number of Web-facing and vendor-facing activities you will pitch in on.
The Ideal Candidate Is…
  • a few years out of college but is at least two or three years away from going to business or other graduate school;
  • charismatic and is instantly likable to a wide variety of people, driven by sparkling wit, a high degree of extraversion, and a balanced mix of self-confidence and humility;
  • able to read people quickly and knows how to treat people accordingly;
  • naturally compassionate and demonstrates strong empathy, easily thinking of the world from the perspective of another person;
  • an active listener and leaves people with the sense that they are well heard;
  • exceptionally detail-oriented and has a memory like a steel trap – nothing falls through the cracks;
  • razor sharp analytically, aced the math section of their SAT test, and excels at analyzing and solving problems;
  • a perfectionist and keeps things in order with ease.