How Universities Work

CHAPTER 2 Management

13 Chapter 2 Management This book is about managing universities with a special emphasis on research universities. Management is a technique, not an end in itself. Academics use a collection of tools and processes as they implement the values and achieve the objectives of their institutions. Universities are not random collections of people operating without system or organization, and like all organizations, they must have management. Institutional managers have many options . They can do things on the spur of the moment or manage through rigid inflexible hierarchies. They can respond to external pressures or internal politics. They can manage by objective or manage with zero-based budgeting. They can do valuebased management. They can follow systems of Total Quality Management or Continuous Quality Improvement. They can implement participatory or autocratic, bottom-up or top-down management. Whatever the name, all universities do management. The more complicated the academic enterprise the more management it requires. While many observers of higher education complain about administration (another word for management), 14 HOW UNIVERSITIES WORK everyone wants the right classes offered at the right time and in the right sequence, their bills paid, federal and state regulations adhered to, student health and welfare watched, safety assured, and buildings and grounds maintained. Management or administration does all of this and much more. Often the university needs people with specific skills to manage safety, deal with plant and construction, recruit and retain students, operate athletic programs, and perform other specialized tasks. When these tasks are done well, the university runs smoothly, but when they are performed poorly, the university—its students, faculty, and staff—are left to struggle with endless problems that divert time and effort from the main business of effective teaching and research. There is a balance in university operations between too much and not enough administration, and part of the art of managing universities is to manage with minimal expense and maximal effect. Management Themes Management is essential to the success of any organization, and many experts give advice. Bookstores carry shelves of how-to books on management theory and practice. They offer different sequences of magic steps guaranteed to produce business success , often coining a catchy phrase to capture the essential meaning of their management prescriptions. Frequently, these books reflect the achievements of particular businesspeople who attribute their success to the special principles outlined in their book (and by inference to the brilliance and wisdom of the authors). They tend to downplay the accidental nature of much business success. Living in boom times makes many heroes ; struggling through a recession produces multiple business failures. If read carefully—and everyone should read some of them— most management books focus on the obvious. They identify Management 15 some simple principles and present them in effective ways. The core principles are: • Know the business. • Know the customers. • Appreciate the employees. • Compete against the market. • Pay attention to the money. Everything else elaborates on these themes. Much of what appears in management books is stylistic rather than substantive . Some talk about managing by walking around or managing by example. All of this is style that reflects primarily methods of communication. While style is surely interesting and useful, it does not replace the substance of management. Popular books on management usually charm the reader with a skillful, breezy style, but often they make no allowance for the complexities of organizations and the widely varying characteristics and circumstances of different enterprises. Everything that a management guru says works somewhere, in some business, under some circumstances. Many such books have interesting insights, but most offer buzzwords that often fail to clarify the specific challenges of real organizations. Indeed, if a science of management existed, we would need only a few books to explain it. The proliferation of how-to-succeed-in-management books reassures us that management is a practical art performed in real time, not an experimental science with specific, definable results. Indeed, the Dilbert comic strip frequently highlights the accidental nature of business success or failure. Those who observe and study academic management in similar organizations over time discover that managers (deans, department chairs, program directors, vice presidents or chancellors , and provosts, for example) employ highly diverse styles and techniques and nonetheless achieve great success. Others with identical styles using similar techniques achieve much less. 16 HOW UNIVERSITIES WORK Style and technique are not the core issues of management. They have their purposes and uses...