ABSTRACT
In this chapter and the next our task will be to identify the basic parts of a management system, then in Chapter 4 we shall assemble them together and by turning the handle we shall test the mechanism we have built. In the previous chapter we mentioned that there would be five basic parts and it happens to be convenient to describe four of them in this chapter, leaving the fifth to be described in the next; the four dealt with in this chapter are relevant to management and the fifth is relevant to organisations - it will be seen at once how arbitrary this split is because one cannot have an organisation without management and one cannot practise management anywhere but in an organisation. To clarify the exposition, however, we are going to separate the inseparable just for the period of these two brief chapters. The extreme brevity of these two chapters also requires some explanation - we are trying to strip ‘management’ of all inessential details to get down to its bare bones and the bare essentials of most subjects are quite simple and can be described quite quickly. The reason we want to get down to the bare minimum is that, since we are trying to study management from a new angle, we want to exclude any preconceived ideas on the subject that are not part of the essence of management. It is part of the essence of a wheelbarrow that it has a wheel; it is not part of its essence to have a cast-iron wheel, that is just a feature of a nineteenth-century wheelbarrow. In exactly the same way we must try to exclude anything in our basic management system that is not part of the essence of management - we must avoid putting something in that is really only a piece of nineteenth-century management folk-lore. If we are going to get down to essentials, then, we must not be surprised if what we find is extremely simple - but 10we must also be sure that we have not so oversimplified the system that it does not work at all. We are aiming to describe a management system which has been so purged of inessentials that it is only just workable - take away one more part and it would fail to function. This is the minimum system we are searching for; we are going to call it MS o where ‘MS’ stands for Management System, of course, and ‘o’ (zero) implies that it is as simple and elementary a system as one can possibly design.
