WHERE SCIENCE COMES TO LIFE

Are you really able to manage the company?   You may be an excellent innovator or a professional entrepreneur, but does that mean you can manage the process that will transform your brilliant idea into a profitable business?

Sad to say, the number of times I’ve found myself answering this question in the negative concerning entrepreneurs in their professional lives is several times greater than the times an entrepreneur is found competent to manage their own business.  Whilst the entrepreneur is constantly seeking to improve their invention or looking for ways to further upgrade the concept, the manager is concerned with such ‘trivial’ matters as paying the salaries on time, producing reports for the bank and personally supervising the suppliers to make sure they don’t ‘make mistakes’ in their bills. While the entrepreneur is occupied with thinking ahead and looking towards the distant future, the manager is racking his brains over how to pay the salaries during a cash flow crisis, or planning out the optimal use for next month’s  budget.

So are you a manager?  Where exactly is your head when you’re reading a book? Where do your thoughts wander? If you doubt the necessity of managing the cash flow, of working with the banks in an organized manner or of meeting international standards, then it would seem your basic managerial abilities are low.  If while reading these pages the back of your mind continues to work on the development of your product and your idea, and you are sure that these are only technical details that can be taken care of in just a few minutes, possibly your basic managerial abilities are low.  If when reading this book you fail to see why management should take up such a lot of time – if you think it is a waste of valuable time – then very likely management is not for you.

And here comes the real conflict: if you aren’t wired for management, that doesn’t mean your ventures don’t need managing. The fact that the entrepreneur is not a manager doesn’t make management unnecessary.  Or worse – it doesn’t mean that you have to compromise with poor management, just because the entrepreneur is determined to manage the business on their own.

What is management?

The word ‘management’ is defined as a process or series of fluid and related activities that leads a group of people to a common objective within a series of constraints. Management is based on the formal authority invested in the manager (whether by virtue of the fact that they own the business or because they have been appointed by other more senior managers) in their work with those under them or with their managerial colleagues in other departments.  Of course this book will not enter into all the complex aspects of management (although this subject is fascinating in its own right and of utmost importance). We will discuss only those subjects related to the world of business entrepreneurship and the regular processes of management that bring the entrepreneur to the objectives they have set for themselves, and which maintain their achievements over time.

It may appear that management is of a lower priority than the concept itself, but in actual fact, organisations and companies who owned excellent concepts and brilliant inventions have failed and fallen apart because of poor management.  On the other hand, excellent management cannot work wonders without a good product or a brilliant concept, even if at times such things have been known to happen .  Such a statement is on its own very forceful but even beyond it the consequences of poor management are budgetary, organisational, the quality of reporting and more. This is true not only with regard to the final results but with regard to the entire process that leads to the final result.  The true significance of good management is that goals and objectives are met through considered use of resources, early monitoring of all factors that could cause a delay to the schedule and dealing with them in a timely fashion. This definition may be very wide but is easily comprehensible – especially where the discussion is focused on managing business and entrepreneurial processes whose purpose is to bring profit to the shareholders over the long term.

By Dr. Tsvika Ben-Porat. Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of BIRAD. Author of the book Three’s a Company – Man, Entrepreneur, and Manager