Английский для экономистов (учебник английского языка)

No school, professor or book can make you a manager. Only you can do this, and you can become a manager only by managing. Of course, you can learn the skills that are extremely helpful, particularly in such clearly defined areas as accounting, statistics, law, and finance. But this will not make you a manager. Experience is the only teacher. Experience is, however, is not the uniformly effective teacher. An old aphorism criticizes the person who has worked for 20 years but has only reexperienced the first year 20 times. Learning is not automatic. What schools can do, and what books can do is to provide you with some insights and intellectual tools to be applied against your experience. Most of you are practical people; certainly most managers are. You are concerned about doing things than about thinking about them. You are more concerned with action than with contemplation. Most business students and managers are uneasy about theory. It is abstract and difficult, too unrelated to real problems, it seems, ‘too academic’ and just ‘too theoretical’. But theory is very important because you and all men and women of action are also theorists. No matter how pragmatic you consider yourself, no matter how rooted in reality a manager views himself, you and he operate on theories. You all possess your own theories about motivation, authority, objectives and change. You will need them – and you will have them whether you know it or not. You will be a better manager if you are aware of your assumptions and you examine them periodically and modify them when necessary. Nothing is as practical as a good theory. A great deal of management theory and practice must be described as ‘common sense’. For the objectives of management may be defined as the formulation of priorities and plans.

TEXT 6

MANAGEMENT AS A PROFESSION 

The criteria necessary for professional status include three major components:

– An acceptable level of competence in a specified field of knowledge.

– The placing of the interests of society before personal interests in carrying out functions of the profession.

– A code of conduct as behavior imposed upon members and usually enforced internally.

If we examine the field of managementin light of thesecharacteristics, what shall we find out?

Thereis no question that management as a discipline has developed a body of knowledge, which is becoming more and more sophisticated part of the curriculum in many academic institu–tions. Research in the field, particularly in the quantitative and behavioral areas, shows promise of making even more signi–ficant advances in the future. More and more academic institu–tions offering business programs are devoting their primary attention to graduate education in the area of management, with a particular emphasis on both theoretical and practical research. A growing number of business schools are making efforts to integrate faculty move closely with members of the business community so as to apply research findings to actual business problems.