To the Instructor

The overall purpose of Management is to communicate a fundamental under

standing of formal organizations--profit and nonprofit, small and large--and

their effective management. The effective manager takes situational differences

into account and is proactive--anticipating the future and preparing for i~

rather than reactive.

The field of management is so broad that quite often introductory texts

concentrate on a single conceptual approach, such as management processes,

But we believe that basing an introductoW book on a single narrow approach

does a disservice to students. Over the years, many of you have agreed that

Management satisfied your needs and those of your students.

In this third edition, we have made an even more concerted effort to listen

to those who have used Management and those who have not in revising the

book to better meet their needs. The result, we hope, is a text that retains the

qualities that accounted for its acceptance in the past, but that also has been

changed in a number of important ways, making Management even better at

meeting the needs and objectives of the first managemenl course.

We continue to believe that an eclectic approach that integrates the most

useful, influential, and widely accepted contributions from all major schools and

approaches is most consistent with reality and best serves students. Instead of

using a particular school of thought to unify our discussion, we stress the need

to consider the situation as a whole when making management decisions.

Throughout the book we point out that the manager should always consider

the interrelationships between parts of an organization (its internal variables),

the organization and its environment (external variables), and that any decision

affects all aspects of the organization in some way. This is not a purely top

management perspective. Our atin, rather, is to make the reader a more effective

manager at any level in the organization by helping him or her understand the

factors involved in making genuinely effective decisions.