Reflective Paper

Introduction

Management is a system of administrative practices in a market or a market economy, which suggest the orientation of the firm on the demand and market needs, the constant desire to improve efficiency at the lowest cost, in order to obtain optimal results. The essence of management is to optimize the utilization of resources (land, labor, entrepreneurship and capital) to achieve their goals. The four basic functions of management are Planning, Organizing, Leading and Controlling (Flamholtz, 1996).

This paper is a reflective paper on the four basic functions of management. In addition to this the paper applies the four basic functions of management on what was learned during the group experiences.

Body

The four basic functions of management (as defined above) are all interrelated to each other.

Planning:

This function defines the objectives of the organization, tools and best practices for achieving these goals. Important elements of this function are the projections of possible directions of development and strategic plans. At this stage, the firm must determine what the actual results it can achieve, assess their strengths and weaknesses, as well as state of the external environment (economic conditions in the country, government acts, the position of trade unions, the actions of competing organizations, consumer preferences, social attitudes, the development of technologies). This function includes defining the goals of the organization, developing a comprehensive strategy for achieving these goals and developing a detailed hierarchy of plans to integrate and coordinate activities, includes the following activities:

Resource allocation

Programming (Daft & Lane, Pp. 5).

Applying the planning function to the group experiences/activities (i.e. winter survival) learned/conducted in the class it can be said that the process of decision making, and the ways through which the group made the decisions and even the errors that emerged in the group decision making process are all the part of application function.

Organizing:

This function generates control structure of the organization and provides it with everything you need. That is, at this stage, the conditions for achieving the goals of the organization. Good organization enables staff to achieve more effective results. Organizing is the way of designing the structure of a business or enterprise. Includes determining the tasks to be performed, which should be done first, as the tasks are grouped, who reports to whom and where decisions are made. The organizational structure should be designed so as to be clearly defined who has to do specific tasks and who is responsible for ...