Perpustakaan UIN Jurai Siwo Lampung

In this sixth edition of Essentials of Contemporary Management, we continue to focus on provid-ing the most up-to-date account of the changes taking place in the world of management and management practices while maintaining our emphasis on making our text relevant and inter¬esting to students. And we know from feedback from instructors and students that the text does engage them. Our increased focus on the chal¬lenges and opportunities facing businesses large and small and integrated timely examples bring management issues to life for students.
The number and complexity of the strate-gic, organizational, and human resource chal-lenges facing managers and all employees have continued to increase throughout the 2000s. In most companies, managers at all levels are playing catch-up as they work toward meet¬ing these challenges by implementing new and improved management techniques and practices. Today, relatively small differences in performance between companies, such as in the speed at which they bring new products or services to market or in the ways they motivate their employees to find ways to reduce costs or improve performance, can combine to give a company a significant competitive advantage. Managers and companies that utilize proven management techniques and practices in their decision making and actions increase their effec¬tiveness over time. Companies and managers that are slower to implement new management techniques and practices find themselves at a growing competitive disadvantage that makes it even more difficult to catch up. Thus, in many industries there is a widening gap between the most successful companies whose performance reaches new heights and their weaker competi¬tors, because their managers have made better decisions about how to use company resources in the most efficient and effective ways.
The challenges facing managers continue to mount as changes in the global environment, such as increasing global outsourcing and ris¬ing commodity prices, impact organizations large and small. Moreover, the revolution in

information technology (IT) has transformed how managers make decisions across all levels of a company's hierarchy and across all its functions and global divisions. This sixth edition addresses these emerging challenges. For example, we extend our treatment of global outsourcing, examine its pros and cons, and examine the new management problems that emerge when mil¬lions of functional jobs in IT, customer service, and manufacturing are performed in countries overseas. Similarly, increasing globalization means that managers must respond to major dif¬ferences in the legal rules and regulations and ethical values and norms that prevail in coun¬tries around the globe.
Other major challenges we continue to expand on in this edition include the impact of the steadily increasing diversity of the workforce on companies and how this increasing diversity makes it imperative for managers to understand how and why people differ so that they can effec¬tively manage and reap the performance bene¬fits of diversity. Similarly, across all functions and levels, managers and employees must continually seek ways to "work smarter" and increase perfor¬mance. Using new IT to improve all aspects of an organization's operations to enhance efficiency and customer responsiveness is a vital part of this process. So too is the continuing need to innovate and improve the quality of goods and services, and the ways they are produced, to allow an organization to compete effectively. We significantly revised this edition of Essentials of Contemporary Management to address these chal-lenges to managers and their organizations.