Principles of Management

Before getting ahead of ourselves, just what is management, let alone principles of management? A manager's primary challenge is to solve problems creatively, and you should view management as "the art of getting things done through the efforts of other people.The principles of management, then, are the means by which you actually manage, that is, get things done through others-individually, in groups, or in organizations. Formally defined, the principles of management are the activities that "plan, organize, and control the operations of the basic elements of [people], materials, machines, methods, money and markets, providing direction and coordination, and giving leadership to human efforts, so as to achieve the sought object of the enterprise."The fundamental notion of principles of management was developed by French management theorist Henri Fayol (1841-1925). He is credited with the original planning-organizing-leading-controlling framework (P-O-L-C), which, while undergoing very important changes in content, remains the dominant management framework in the world.