The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.” Actuating, or putting the machinery in motion, is described by Terry as “getting all of the members of the group to want to achieve and strive to achieve the objectives the manager wants them to achieve because they want to achieve them.” This may oversimplify the process; perhaps a more explicit definition of actuating is “the processes of staffing and directing personnel toward the most efficient accomplishment of stated goals and objectives.”
Staffing, then, becomes the key to the actuating process. If an organization is staffed with those persons who are competent and most able carry out their roles, then the problems of directing are minimized. The objective of staffing, then, is to see that positions in an organization are filled with persons able and willing to occupy them. The more clearly an organizational role is defined and translated into human requirements, and the better the personnel are evaluated and trained, the higher the quality of the personnel.
Staffing is an executive function which includes the recruitment, selection, training, promotion, and retirement of subordinate managers. While planning and organizing are almost mechanical, the staffing and directing function deals with people and here the behavioral science approach makes its greatest contribution. Mathematical tools may be useful, but the complexity of the individual does not yield to precise mathematical analysis. Staffing is performed at every level of management, and hence is a job of management at every level. Management is both an art and a science, and while some aspects of it can be taught, others can only be learned by experience, especially the aspect of dealing with people. Actuating thus becomes a function in short supply, and the development of managers becomes one of the most crucial in business or any other enterprises. Once selected, the manager must be able to direct the enterprise in terms of its chosen aims.
The purpose of direction is to see that employees accomplish their tasks. Without direction, planning, organizing, and staffing stand slight chance of success. A building may be brilliantly planned and designed, and the best contractors chosen to build it, but nothing can happen until the foundations are poured.
Directing means coordinating and integrating people working toward common goals, and involves both horizontal and vertical relationships. The director-manager governs the entire operation. Direction is more art than science, although the findings of the behavioral sciences should help the manager in his efforts. Important in all management, but perhaps mostly in the function of actuating, is the ability to communicate within the system. Communication involves several steps. The source of the communication is a manager wishing to provide direction toward accomplishing an objective. His message may be thoroughly clear to himself, but he must encode it in terms that will have meaning to the receiver. He may have several media available for transmitting the encoded message: face-to-face conversation, a written memo, a meeting, an intercom system, etc. The receiver in turn hears the message, but to understand it, he must decode it in a framework meaningful to himself Feedback is the control which determines whether communication has been successful. If the message is fully understood and the job done, it will be positive. If there are questions to be asked and answered, it will be partly positive. If the message is not understood it will be totally inadequate, and the feedback will be negative.
In every communication system there is interference or “noise” of one sort of another. The noise may be physical or conceptual, as when a message has been poorly worded so that the receiver cannot understand it. It is vital that lines of communication, both vertical and horizontal, exist within an organization. It must be possible for messages to move in both dimensions. Managers should use the informal organization to supplement the communication channels of the formal organization. The two-step theory of communication perhaps best explains the use of the informal organization in communications. Within every informal group of peers there is a leader, to whom the others look for informal direction. Although a communication may be addressed to an entire group and be understood by all of them, they may still tend to seek the assurance of their leader before acting. The manager may therefore try to communicate with this leader, if he knows who he is, and so use the leader to communicate with the group. Gossip is a form of informal communication, and the grapevine is its line of transmission, the two-step approach can be useful in negating or eliminating gossip harmful to the firm.
Actuating involves staffing, directing, and communicating to those who carry out the plans of the firm within the organizational framework. The famous line of the Scottish poet Robert Burns-“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley”-aptly describes the enterprise system that has been well planned, well-organized, but poorly actuated.
Actuation deals with people-with the traits of being emotional, irrational, and unpredictable-and is therefore often the weakest link in the structure of any enterprise. The principles listed in this section can be of great help in directing people, as long as one keeps in mind the dynamic and continuously changing nature of our society and the business system within it.
Probably the most outstanding examples of control in history have been the Apollo manned space flights, Under constant surveillance and control from NASA Manned Space Center in Houston, Texas, the flights, although tens of thousands of miles away, were directed and controlled to their destinations. By definition, control always involves three steps: (1) establishment of standards, (2) information and measurement against standards, and (3) action to correct deviations from standards at every level of operation, control is vital to the attainment of goals. The systems approach of this book is a means of review and control by which procedures may be examined in every unit of every subsystem within a firm. If any unit in a system fails, this failure will affect the whole.
The three areas of control are the preliminary, concurrent, and feedback. Preliminary control aims to prevent deviations in quality and quantity of resources used. It deals with inputs. If inputs are not up to specified standards, problems will arise later. Concurrent control is a check on planned activities or transformation processes. Feedback control checks and reports on the end product or output. Over time, a series of principles has evolved to guide the manager in exercising control. These are applicable to every enterprise and form of organization. The purpose of control is to anticipate or correct deviations from plans. As the number of controls increase, the more effective these controls become. More techniques involved in detecting potential or actual deviations from plans save the system extra cost and other unwanted consequences. Standards are set up to check performance, and control is exercised at every point where results can be reviewed and compared to standards. Standards are generally devised in terms of physical dimension, cost, capital, revenue, program and intangibles. Certain points in the system are strategic for constant review, and the manager may use these to check intermediate points. As mentioned earlier, budgets are financial plans, and performance may be checked against budgets as a control device.
