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Chapter 1
Introduction to Principles of Management and Business Planning in
Entrepreneurship

Reading this chapter will help you do the following:
1. Learn who managers are and about the nature of their work.
2. Know why you should care about leadership, entrepreneurship, and
strategy.
3. Know the dimensions of the planning-organizing-leading-controlling
(P-O-L-C) framework.
4. Learn how economic performance feeds social and environmental
performance.
5. Understand what performance means at the individual and group
levels.
6. Create your survivor’s guide to learning and developing principles of
management.

We’re betting that you already have a lot of experience with organizations,
teams, and leadership. You’ve been through schools, in clubs, participated in social
or religious groups, competed in sports or games, or taken on full- or part-time jobs.
Some of your experience was probably pretty positive, but you were also likely
wondering sometimes, “Isn’t there a better way to do this?”
After participating in this course, we hope that you find the answer to be
“Yes!” While management is both art and science, with our help you can identify and
develop the skills essential to better managing your and others’ behaviors where
organizations are concerned.
Before getting ahead of ourselves, just what is management, let alone
principles of management? A manager’s primary challenge is to solve problems
creatively, and you should view management as “the art of getting things done
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through the efforts of other people.” The principles of management, then, are the
means by which you actually manage, that is, get things done through others—
individually, in groups, or in organizations. Formally defined, the principles of
management are the activities that “plan, organize, and control the operations of the
basic elements of [people], materials, machines, methods, money and markets,
providing direction and coordination, and giving leadership to human efforts, so as to
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achieve the sought objectives of the enterprise.” For this reason, principles of
management are often discussed or learned using a framework called P-O-L-C, which
stands for planning, organizing, leading, and controlling.
Managers are required in all the activities of organizations: budgeting,
designing, selling, creating, financing, accounting, and artistic presentation; the larger
the organization, the more managers are needed. Everyone employed in an
organization is affected by management principles, processes, policies, and practices
as they are either a manager or a subordinate to a manager, and usually they are both.

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