Management At One Smooth Stone Analysis

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Management at One Smooth Stone After viewing the video on the management at One Smooth Stone, it becomes very clear that Mark Ledogar and Gary Vik exemplify their definition of management through a decentralized business structure that encourages and supports personal empowerment. This type of management style and business structure allows One Smooth Stone to place a greater emphasis on Mintzberg’s interpersonal managerial role. With a less rigid organization of management, it becomes easier to quickly respond to the desires of the customer. As a company that is responsible for the planning of corporate events, a large portion of success relies mainly on the interaction between One Smooth Stone and its clients as well as their ability to identify their clients’ needs. In the 1970’s, Robert Katz identified the three principal skills acquired by managers through education and experience, as being technical, conceptual and human skills (Kinicki & Williams, 2013). Both conceptual and human skills are displayed throughout the video in the interactions between the business and client. With such a wide array of clients, all with varied and constantly changing requests, having the ability to speak and interact well with others is as equally as valuable as having the vision needed to conceptualize a project or presentation that will appeal to the client. With a loose management system that allows a wide range of control, as well as employing strategic improvising, One Smooth Stone is able to quickly and constantly adapt to the wide variety of needs expressed by their clients. The fact that One Smooth Stone eliminated a strict organizational management structure in order to place primary focus on the feedback of the customer as well as consistently change and build their own business strategy based upon those ever changing customer demands, shows just how much of an open system One Smooth Stone is. Even with the wider range of control and a hierarchy that is not so well defined, One Smooth Stone still continues to apply at least something from all three management theories: classical, behavioral, and modern management. A classical approach is taken through its use of the scientific management approach by recruiting employees that can be trusted to think for themselves and are highly skilled and highly trained. This falls directly under one of Frederick W. Taylor’s main principles of scientific management: To carefully select workers with the right abilities for the task in order to increase efficiency and production. The behavioral approach to management is used in the designation of employees to clients as well as the sense of community provided by the loose management structure. …show more content…
Part of Hugo Munsterberg’s contribution to behavioral management was that psychologists could contribute to industry by studying and determining which people are best suited for particular jobs (Kinicki & Williams, 2013). This goes hand in hand with One Smooth Stone’s strategy of making sure that the interpersonal skills and personality of their employee matches up directly with clients. Mary Parker Follett played a huge part in the development of behavioral management as well, suggesting that organizations should be run as communities, with managers working alongside their employees instead of delegating orders. Her belief was that power should not be delegated, but instead could be grown and developed by managers giving employees opportunities to establish effective relationships with others and demonstrating a stake in the enterprise (Miller & Vaughan, 2001). This sense of empowerment is exemplified by One Smooth Stone’s elimination of departments and the wider sense of control enabled to its employees. Perhaps the biggest influence on the management structure of One Smooth Stone is the modern management approach of contingency. The contingency viewpoint places emphasis on the uniqueness of every situation, the main belief being that a manager’s approach to any situation will vary depending on the individual and the environment. Since the management structure is not well defined and the needs and requests of the clients are ever changing, this contingency viewpoint must be used …show more content…
The classical approach of scientific management is employed by my company as well, but a much stronger administrative stance is taken. There is a well-defined hierarchy of authority and set of formal rules and procedures as well as a clear division of labor. The use of systems management is also highly emphasized with multiple inputs communicating and relaying customer feedback to one another, while at the same time, working together to produce, assemble, and install

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