Basics of Management. Systemic Paradigm. Cognitive Approach. Behavioral Perspective - Vadim Dumitrascu

INTRODUCTION / 9

CHAPTER 1.
SIMPLE SYSTEMIC APPROACH / 12
1.1. The system - an attempt to define / 12
1.2. Systems: time and borders / 13
1.3. Meta-system as a premise of management / 15
1.4. Feedback / Reverse connection / 16
1.5. Balance / Homeostasis / 18
1.6. Adaptation and viability / 21
1.7. Black box and reverse connection / 23
1.8. The book of the demiurge's head / 26
1.9. The two-step systemic approach / 28

CHAPTER 2.
SYSTEMIC PERSPECTIVES ON BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS / 30
2.1. The systemic approach in metaphors / 30
2.2. “New” organizational metaphors / 31
2.3. Business model / 33
2.4. The model "Leavitt's rhombus" / 40
2.5. Business organization as a socio-technical system / 42

CHAPTER 3.
NATURE AND CONTENT OF MANAGEMENT / 44
3.1. General structure of the management process / 44
3.2. Management as a regulatory activity: a synthesis / 45
3.3. Management space and vectors / 49
3.4. Hierarchies in complex dynamic systems / 51
3.5. Network structures and control hierarchy / 53
3.6. The importance of correctly establishing goals and tasks / 55
3.7. Indicators as reference points for management / 57
3.8. Effects - Efforts Table / 61
3.9. The value of limits and restrictions for management / 65
3.10. To understand correctly the essence of self-organization / 67
3.11. Collective work - nature, self - organization, motivation / 70

CHAPTER 4.
MANAGEMENT DECISION MAKING / 73
4.1. What are the decisions / 73
4.2. The structure of the decisional cycle / 75
4.3. Feedback circuit diagram / 79
4.4. Routine and project subunits / 81
4.5. Types of workers. / 82
4.6. Models and thinking in decision making / 84
4.7. The quantum world and managerial decision making / 85
4.8. The impact of variety on managerial decision making / 88

CHAPTER 5.
LAWS AND GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF MANAGEMENT / 90
5.1. Law No. 1 on management / 90
5.2. The law of inverse connection and the law of external complementarity / 92
5.3. Other principles and general rules of management / 95
5.4. Who's leading, actually? / 98
5.5. The principle of the two levels of leadership / 100
5.6. The law of accumulation of experience / 102
5.7. The doctrine of completed work / 104
5.8. The law of time required / 106

CHAPTER 6.
SILENT DIMENSIONS OF MANAGEMENT / 109
6.1. The power of simple rules in management / 109
6.2. The force of imperceptible changes / 110
6.3. Managerial minimalism / 114
6.4. The role of chance in management / 116
6.5. Organizational crises - the "fire test" of management / 120
6.6. The playful essence of management / 123
6.7. Good management cannot exist without good forecasts / 125
6.8. The value of resources and the effectiveness of management / 127
6.9. About the nature of managerial strategies / 129

CHAPTER 7.
NEUROMANAGEMENT - HOW DO MANAGERS THINK? / 131
7.1. The role of intuition in managerial thinking / 131
7.2. What is the danger of classifications / 132
7.3. Efficiency of binary classifications / 134
7.4. The universal pattern / 135
7.5. Motivational chains and manipulation / 137
7.6. Motivation / 139
7.7. The Speculatrix Machine or the lessons of Gray Walter's turtles / 140
7.8. The secret of logical problems - lessons for managers / 143
7.9. Cognitive blockages / 146

CHAPTER 8.
NEUROMANAGEMENT - WHY ARE MANAGERS WRONG? / 151
8.1. The traps of the mentality / 151
8.2. The effect of emotional fatigue / 154
8.3. The art of forgetting / 156
8.4. Somatic markers, heuristics and quasi-impossibility of optimal managerial decisions / 158
8.5. So why are managers and the rest of humanity wrong? / 161

CHAPTER 9.
COMMUNICATION IN MANAGEMENT / 166
9.1. The double language of communication / 166
9.2. Communication: messages and meanings / 168
9.3. Managerial influence as a communication process / 174
9.4. To influence means to create meanings / 177
9.5. The positional context of communication / 181
9.6. The relational context of communication / 182
9.7. The normative context of communication / 184
9.8. The identity context of communication / 185

CHAPTER 10.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE / 187
10.1. Preliminary notions regarding the organizational culture / 187
10.2. The dimensions of organizational culture / 189
10.3. Typology of organizational cultures / 193
10.4. Factors influencing the organizational culture / 196
10.5. The functions of organizational culture / 198
10.6. The mechanism of formation of the organizational culture / 200

CHAPTER 11.
FUNDAMENTALS OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT / 205
11.1. Learning and conditioning / 205
11.2. The process of forming organizational behaviors / 206
11.3. Basics of organizational behavior management / 208
11.4. Management as a behavior management process / 209
11.5. Management system as a performance generator / 210

CHAPTER 12.
GAME THEORY COMES TO THE HELP OF MANAGEMENT / 212
12.1. The object and key paradigms of game theory / 212
12.2. Nash's balance / 214
12.3. Dynamic or sequential games / 218
12.4. Repeated games. "The prisoner's dilemma" / 219

CHAPTER 13.
SIMULATION OF COMPLEX MANAGEMENT DYNAMICS / 223
13.1. First order negative connection (CIN I) / 223
13.2. Second order negative inverse connection (CIN II) / 224
13.3. Definition and structure of positive inverse connection (CIP) / 227
13.4. Coupled and nonlinear inverse connections / 229
13.5. Levels and rhythms / 232
13.6. Rhythm substructures: objective, observation, difference, action / 234
13.7. General principles of modeling systems / 235
13.8. Level equations / 236
13.9. Auxiliary equations. The constants. Initial values. Calculation interval / 238

CHAPTER 14.
LIMITATIONS OF MANAGEMENT / 242
14.1. The controllability threshold of the company and how it can be exceeded / 242
14.2. And yet, what kind of management is needed? / 245
14.3. From management to leadership / 248

BIBLIOGRAPHY / 256

In management, as in football, politics or small, the whole Romanian is good. What's more, with this management, a western dracovenie that is by no means tailored to the mioritic soul ... If money comes out, it means that the management "goes like the world"! I recently met a former colleague from a previous job, who when asked about how things were going there, replied with naive serenity that "... everything is great, only the management is poor. all". But I don't have to get out of the way of my compatriots for the superficial understanding and application of the management concept by ear. After all, superficiality, improvisation and lack of rigor are the basic ingredients of the Balkan spirit, which makes us so beautiful and unrepeatable as a nation. Let's be honest - the confusion that persists about what management is and what it really has to deal with is largely due to the management itself. So far, management, as a theoretical discipline and practical area, has failed to successfully overcome the huge identity gaps and to win a solid epistemological consistency, legitimizing itself as a well-defined field, built on its own paradigms and having its own object. This explains why most of the public, but also many practitioners, view management as a kind of applied economics or sociology. For many people, management is presented as a vast collection of concepts, methods and tools borrowed, as a rule, from neighboring fields. However, this complex collection lacks overall scientific coherence. More precisely, this coherence exists, but it is very unstable, hesitant and "porous", hence the extraordinary appetite of practitioners for adopting different "fashion trends", presented by various "gurus" as universal managerial panacea: if you introduce as soon as Six Sigma (or TQM or "organizational excellence" etc. etc. etc. etc.) you will get rid of all problems and live profitably, competitively and happily into old age. Therefore, modern management is seen by many as a kind of "medicine cabinet" from which you choose the right remedy for the problems you face, without knowing for sure how to properly administer that doctorate and not even if it is indicated for your suffering. This is why some acid spirits among intellectuals suggest that management is a pseudoscience. This criticism is very well argued, harsh, deserved and ... ultimately fundamentally wrong. Management simply lacks a unifying field for the time being - that clear conceptual positioning on the foundations of an original, own theoretical discourse. Here it is necessary to recognize that, during its almost 150-year existence as a discipline purported to be scientific, management has repeatedly missed the chance to rigorously delimit its unifying conceptual field, although it has had several opportunities. In this regard. During all this time, the evolution of management was characterized by the juxtaposition of successive, opposing and hermetically "schools" from a paradigmatic point of view: the classical school, the school of human relations, the situational school, the political school, the cultural school, etc. Strong but dissonant voices that failed to harmonize in a choir. It is one of the main reasons that management has often been treated only as one of the many economic disciplines, such as, for example, financial analysis or management accounting. Of course, this view has been maintained by the fact that the vast majority of theoretical and practical innovations in management have appeared in economic business. The huge business interest for management is perfectly explainable by the perpetual pressure coming from the imperatives to face the competition and to always increase the economic efficiency. In this intellectual context, which marked the evolution of management, the systemic approach was seen as one of the many currents of competing managerial thinking and nothing more. Outlined between the 40s and 70s of the century. XX, especially through the works of Russel L. Ackoff, A. Stanfford Beer, Jay W. Forrester, Peter F. Drucker, Chris Argyris and Peter M. Senge, but prefaced a little earlier by the revolutionary ideas of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (Father general systems theory), Alexandr Bogdanov (author of the general theory of organization - tectonics) and Chester Barnard (who first described organizations as "cooperating human systems"), the systemic approach of management presents it as the activity of regulating open systems and dynamic in order to achieve well-defined objectives ”. The mission of the management consists in ensuring the viability of the system by permanently achieving its objectives. Defining the boundaries of the system by identifying the reverse connection loops that support its operation, specifying the objectives to be achieved, correctly understanding how the system interacts with the environment and making the necessary regulatory decisions are essential tasks of management. Simple, clear and elegant. From here to the incorporation of cognitive and behavioral perspectives on management is nothing, given the spectacular advances in psychology and neuroscience. The explanation of this epistemological symbiosis is elementary: that regulatory activity that is the essence of management applies not to any type of system, but only to systems with human participation, respectively to systems whose main ingredient is people - groups, companies, public organizations, private institutions non‑ lucrative, cities, local communities in general, etc. and so on The cognitive activities of the human components of these systems (the way they acquire knowledge, evaluate and classify it, analyze and capitalize on it, ie the way they think, make predictions, plan and make decisions), as well as the individual and group behaviors of people like members of the collective action systems represent the main forces that set those systems in motion, being responsible, in the last resort, for their performances. After all, managers themselves are human beings and nothing human is foreign to them. It is very obvious that people are those who, alone or most frequently in cooperation with others, in the work processes, use and value the physical and financial resources of organizations. Without people, tangible assets are "death." In all this phenomenology, not only rational and objective factors intervene. On the contrary, these factors are in the minority, the organizational behaviors being fed mainly from non-rational and subjective sources.
I tried, very briefly, to justify the subtitle of this paper - systemic paradigm, cognitive approach, behavioral perspective, explaining how I intend to present the fundamentals of organizational management. Although I wanted this book to be a university textbook first of all, I couldn't help but give it a popularization note, which explains the massive recourse to examples and analogies in many other areas and sometimes ironic accents, the latter having to be seen especially as a self-persiflage - finally, after so many years of preoccupation in this area, I also began to understand how things are, in fact.

Vadim Dumitrascu