Introduction

To cope with our daily lives we find strategies and tactics that in the broadest sense can be termed ‘management’. It is the buzz word in the organisation of any health system and is something that clinicians moving up the career tree becomes anxious about as they move from clinical care to taking responsibility for organisation of resources and other people.

Management

There are a number of definitions of ‘management’ but most include certain elements that have been described by Levey & Loomba (1987) as being ‘simultaneously the judicious use of resources, the motivation of people, the provision of leadership, planning, controlling and the guidance of an organisation or system toward a set of goals and objectives’. Fayoul (1949), 40 years ago when management as such was in its infancy, described the four basic functions of a manager as planning, organising, coordinating and controlling. By planning he meant looking to the future and drawing up a plan of action; by organising, the building up of a structure of the available resources; by coordinating, the bringing together, unifying and harmonising of all activity and effort; and by controlling he meant seeing that everything occurs in conformity with the established rule and expressed demand.

Over the last few years there has been an explosion of books on how to manage. There are, however, only a few basic principles concerning the role of the manager and these have been summarised by Mintzberg (1975) as falling into three major functions: the leadership role (the figurehead, the leader and the liaison role), information role (monitoring, receiving and sending information and being the spokesman) and the decisional role (the entrepreneur, handling problems, allocating resources and negotiating).