The management by wandering around (MBWA), also management by walking around, [1] refers to a style of business management which involves managers wandering around, in an unstructured manner, through their workplace(s) at random, to check with employees, equipment, or on the status of ongoing work. [1] The emphasis is on the word wandering as an unplanned movement within a workplace, rather than a plan where employees expect a visit from managers at more systematic, pre-approved or scheduled times.
The expected benefit is that a manager who employs this method, by random sampling of events or employee discussions, is more likely to facilitate improvements to the morale, sense of organizational purpose, productivity and total quality management of the organization, as compared to remaining in a specific office area and waiting for employees, or the delivery of status reports, to arrive there, as events warrant in the workplace.
"Management by wandering around" is very similar to the Japanese gemba walk method that was originally developed at Toyota.
The origin of the term has been traced to executives at Hewlett-Packard whose 1970s management practices involved walking around the facility. [2] The general concept of managers making spontaneous visits to employees in the workplace has been a common practice in some other companies. The management consultants Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman used the term in their 1982 book In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best-Run Companies . [3]
Management is the administration of organizations, whether they are a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body through business administration, nonprofit management, or the political science sub-field of public administration respectively. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations.
A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction. It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information, and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continual improvement cycle. In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality are increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration.
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Organizational culture refers to culture related to organizations including schools, universities, not-for-profit groups, government agencies, and business entities. Alternative terms include corporate culture and company culture. The term corporate culture emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It was used by managers, sociologists, and organizational theorists in the 1980s.
In the field of management, strategic management involves the formulation and implementation of the major goals and initiatives taken by an organization's managers on behalf of stakeholders, based on consideration of resources and an assessment of the internal and external environments in which the organization operates. Strategic management provides overall direction to an enterprise and involves specifying the organization's objectives, developing policies and plans to achieve those objectives, and then allocating resources to implement the plans. Academics and practicing managers have developed numerous models and frameworks to assist in strategic decision-making in the context of complex environments and competitive dynamics. Strategic management is not static in nature; the models can include a feedback loop to monitor execution and to inform the next round of planning.
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Thomas J. Peters is an American writer on business management practices, best known for In Search of Excellence
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In Search of Excellence is a book written by Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr. First published in 1982, it sold three million copies in its first four years, and was the most widely held monograph in the United States from 1989 to 2006. The book explores the art and science of management used by several companies in the 1980s.
Robert H. Waterman Jr. was a non-fiction author and expert on business management practices.
Management consists of the planning, prioritizing, and organizing work efforts to accomplish objectives within a business organization. A management style is the particular way managers go about accomplishing these objectives. It encompasses the way they make decisions, how they plan and organize work, and how they exercise authority.
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Genchi genbutsu (現地現物) literally translates "real location, real thing” and it is a key principle of the Toyota Production System. The principle is sometimes referred to as "go and see." It suggests that in order to truly understand a situation one needs to observe what is happening at the site where work actually takes place: the gemba (現場). One definition is that it is "collecting facts and data at the actual site of the work or problem."
Norman Bodek was a teacher, consultant, author and publisher who published over 100 Japanese management books in English, including the works of Taiichi Ohno and Dr. Shigeo Shingo. He taught a course on "The Best of Japanese Management Practices" at Portland State University. Bodek created the Shingo Prize with Dr. Vern Beuhler at Utah State University. He was elected to Industry Week's Manufacturing Hall of Fame and founded Productivity Press. He was also the President of PCS Press. He died on December 9, 2020, at the age of 88.
William C. Byham is an American entrepreneur, author and industrial/organizational psychologist.
Emotions in the workplace play a large role in how an entire organization communicates within itself and to the outside world. "Events at work have real emotional impact on participants. The consequences of emotional states in the workplace, both behaviors and attitudes, have substantial significance for individuals, groups, and society". "Positive emotions in the workplace help employees obtain favorable outcomes including achievement, job enrichment and higher quality social context". "Negative emotions, such as fear, anger, stress, hostility, sadness, and guilt, however increase the predictability of workplace deviance,", and how the outside world views the organization.
The McKinsey 7S Framework is a management model developed by business consultants Robert H. Waterman, Jr. and Tom Peters in the 1980s. This was a strategic vision for groups, to include businesses, business units, and teams. The 7 S's are structure, strategy, systems, skills, style, staff and shared values.
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Gwendolyn Galsworth is an American President and Founder of Visual Thinking Inc and also an author, researcher, teacher, consultant, publisher and leader in the field of visuality in the workplace and visual management. Her books have won multiple Shingo Prize awards in the Research and Professional Publication category, focusing on conceptualizing and codifying workplace visuality into a single, comprehensive framework of knowledge and know-how called the "visual workplace."