Kaizen for Education in Business Management

Professional ‘management’ in the context of organizations and activities related to business and/or social goals involves understanding the constituent elements and their relationships with each other in order to achieve some predetermined results. These results could include, for example, supplying better quality shirts in a particular market, making certain level of profits, getting entry into a new market, or improving the quality of potato chips in comparison to the competition.

Most of the elements of relevance for an organized business or social activity can be categorized into the following:

-       Organizational goals

-       Resources

-       Processes and Systems

-       Infrastructure

-       Environment

-       Organizational culture and values

-       People - their characteristics, roles and values

-       Perceptions of the future

In the management literature you will generally find the mention of the following core management functions:

-       Finance and Accounting

-       Marketing

-       Human Resource

-       General Management (Strategic Planning, Tactical Management, Operations Management, Project Management, etc.)

This categorization reflects the roots of the management profession in the hardcore business of making profits by mobilizing and optimizing resources to produce a product or service and sell it to the customers in some pre-identified markets.

However, since the beginning of the Industrial era, the business environment has been constantly evolving and throwing new challenges continually. In the 80s the global competition in the marketplace spearheaded by the Japanese in the consumer products domain necessitated the need for new strategies for product development and design.

In the 90s the opening up of the formerly localized economies like India, China and Russia generated the high volume of international trading and marketing like never before. In the same era, the advent of the Internet and worldwide web threw tremendous challenges for the old business models based on ‘brick and mortar’ paradigm. The 2000s have been seeing a phenomenal impact of mobile and portable technologies on business and social activities.

The continuing emergence of new management issues requires the creation and development of new management functions. Some of these are:

-       International business

-       Business laws

-       Information technology

-       R&D management

-       Product development and design

-       Quality management

-       Knowledge management

-       Infrastructure management

-       Corporate social responsibility

-       Environment and sustainability

-       Design thinking and design management

This list, although not comprehensive, does indicate the impact of the changing business and social scenarios on the management practices. It is then imperative for those organizations involved in delivering appropriate value to their stakeholders and end-users to continually re-equip themselves through education, training in new methods and tools, and the development of their ability to deal with the emerging future scenarios.

Copyright (c)  Vinai Kumar