Essay About Quickbook

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

This course is designed to enable students to analyze business situations from the point of view of the practicing general manager. General managers (e.g., CEOs) have responsibility for making strategic decisions that insure the long-term health of the entire firm or a major division. The key tasks involved in general management include the detection of and adaptation to environmental change, the procurement and allocation of critical resources, the integration of activities across subparts of the organization, and, at the most senior levels, the determination of corporate purpose and direction.

To be effective, general managers need to have an in-depth understanding of the generic problems in relevant functional areas such as marketing, finance, R&D, and production. However, this does not mean that general managers can only be "generalists" who know a little bit of everything, but not very much of any one thing. Instead, general managers need not only functionally-based knowledge, but also the ability to deal with problems and issues confronting the total enterprise, including relationships between the enterprise and its external environment. Thus, students are expected to combine knowledge from other courses with the new information presented here to develop sophisticated interpretations and analyses of the strategic issues facing the firms we study.

Not everyone who takes this course will ultimately become a general manager. Yet, for two reasons, this course will benefit virtually all students. First, recent trends in the corporate world towards creating "flatter", less hierarchical, organizations have resulted in decisions about how to handle strategic-level issues being made at ever lower hierarchical levels. Thus, even non-executives are likely to make decisions and initiate actions that have significant strategic implications. Similarly, even the lowest level employees within firms are now being asked to contribute innovative and creative ideas that will improve the functioning of the organization as a whole. Thus, it is increasingly important for non-executives to understand how their actions affect the total enterprise. Second, functional specialists will also benefit from developing a general management perspective. Ultimately, every function's actions must be coordinated with the overall needs of the business. In fact, functional specialists are the people on whom general managers must rely to implement strategy. Since functional managers are often under pressure to fix problems in their own areas without regard to the overall needs of the business, it is critical that functional managers develop a keen awareness and appreciation of the challenges facing the enterprise as a whole.

Communication is integral to general management. Therefore, as discussed further below, your active participation