By: Umer Mehmood Dadu

In everyday life, a person does many things like managing home, family, work, shopping, saving pocket money, purchasing vegetables, managing social life, and many more. If one observes keenly, unknowingly, in all these activities, a person actually manages many things in the daily life. Activities like money management, saving, expenditure, things to purchase, giving priority to immediate activities, and postponing the unimportant things are all part of life. At the time of shopping or purchasing items, importance is given to the quality of product as well as its features. In summary, all these activities can simply be called as ‘Management.’ There is a perfect correlation between the management thoughts and theories proposed by famous management gurus in our lives.

F.Y.Taylor defines management as “the art of knowing what you want to do and then seeing that it is done in the best and cheapest way.” This definition is highly apt for our personal lives too.

To increase the efficiency in organizations, the management is used in a broader prospective. The main objective of all organizations is to earn profit and be responsible to the stakeholders. Similarly, in one’s personal life, we manage money, price, quantity, quality, budget to get a quality product for a low price. Organizations also manage money, plan for their budgets and expenditure, procure raw material economically, manage people, and manage the organizational processes to achieve targeted productivity. In all these management activities, various functions of management like Planning, Organizing, Directing, Controlling, Staffing, Leading and Motivating are involved. These activities belong to several departments like Marketing, Finance, HR, Business Strategy, Operations Management, IT and Systems among others. Management is a dynamic process and whether organizations or human beings, it is essential to adapt the management strategies to the ever changing external environment. Organizations and people do constantly interact with the external environment and change their management styles as per the requirement.

For example, due to the introduction of the VAT (Value Added Tax) in UAE, organizations have to immediately make lot of modifications to their cost structure, profit margins and competitive strategies to sustain the business. Similarly, the citizens of UAE also need to modify their daily lives and habits by looking at their spending patterns and tune them to VAT. In organizations, every activity or process are inter-related and mutually dependent on one another. For example, production depends on market demand, market demand depends on economy and spending habits of individuals, and customer behavior. Requirement of manpower depends on production capacity and in turn production capacity and manpower planning depends on the availability of budget. Thus, management process is a highly dynamic one.

Management can be compared with the clutch, accelerator, break and steering of a car which control the entire movement of the car. Similarly, in a personal life, individuals apply all these parts of a car to their lifestyle by using one or the other part, whenever and wherever it is required to manage according to the ever changing dynamics of external environment. Thus, all the human beings perform several management activities in their everyday life unknowingly.

Human beings can manage their personal lives by learning management skills, like organizations train their employees to learn the management skills. This requires a formal management education in some reputed Business School. Undergraduate and Post-graduate programmes like BBA and MBA programmes in various disciplines of management i.e., Marketing, Finance, HR, Operations, Business Strategy, International Business, Information Systems will develop these management skills with specific emphasis on these disciplines.