General Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words - 1

General Management - Essay Example General Management General management is a specialized field of business management. The origin of this field can be traced back centuries ago when landowning entailed management of property and slaves. While technologies evolved, general management’s scope also became sophisticated and broad. Colley et al. define general management as a discipline that basically focuses on overseeing the modern corporation’s status based on the concept of â€Å"profit-and-loss† (P&L) (3). General Managers see to it that the company gains profit more than what the company is spending. In other words, general management involves various concepts and ideas in ensuring that a business survives and does not undergo bankruptcy. General management entails leadership skills because it allows managing employees- from managers to employees to projects and to customers. Hence, general management involves enhancing responsibility and communication abilities in order to deal with people. In big corporations, the chief executive officer is automatically the general manager, while subsequent divisions of the company may have their own general manager, usually using the title â€Å"business unit manager, division manager, managing partner,† among others (Colley et al. 4). General management tasks are basically involving sound and strong leadership abilities. These leadership skills entail identifying the company’s goals and objectives, achieving those goals, and being in-charge of the results of the set goals and objectives (â€Å"General Management† par. 2). As a Course High school graduates may find general management as a course interesting because aside from the acquisition of corporate knowledge and skills, the opportunities that await are, to some extent, realizations of one’s corporate dreams. Moreover, college graduates who want to pursue an MBA may want to specialize in General Management, as well. Topics that are usually covered in Ge neral Management include strategic management, organizational change and behavior, marketing strategies, approaches in problem-solving, theories in general management and accounting, and how to use communication strategies in leadership and conflict resolution. Conflict management is a vital concept in general management because it involves handling problems that arise within your management stint. Under General Management, there are answers to the causes of conflict in an organization, such as individual personality differences, communication problems, structure of the organization, organizational culture, among such things (Wall and Callister 518). I chose General Management as a major amidst the proliferation of management courses, because it means enhancing my leadership skills in order to guide people in achieving goals and objectives, aligned with mine. It gives me a general picture of the structure of an organization, the people involved in the business undertakings and their role, and handling organizational problems, failures, and lapses. It prepares me to be the best CEO in the future. The jobs that await General Management graduates include: Purchasing Manager Production Manager Marketing Manager Sales Manager Finance Manager Manufacturing Manager Chief

Does specialization must lead to an evolutionary dead end Term Paper

Does specialization must lead to an evolutionary dead end - Term Paper Example The term ‘specialist’ refers to organisms that are adapted to a narrow range of environmental conditions and thus occupy one extreme of the adaptation band. On the other end are ‘generalists’, which are able to utilize a wider range of environmental conditions. Factors such as â€Å"jack of all, master of none† and freedom from natural enemies, have been used to justify the prevalence of specialists, however; it has also been postulated that in spite of these advantages, specialization would gradually lead to loss of genetic variations, thus disabling capacity of adaptation to altered set of environmental conditions. These factors would eventually lead to extinction of a specialized organism, a theory first put forward by Cope IN 1896 and termed â€Å"law of the unspecialized† (Kelly and Farrel, 1998). Another implication of this concept is that the specialists are derived from generalists and the change is irreversible. This theory has been ch allenged by larger number of recent studies, and the evidences contradicting the implications of this theory are mounting. These evidences have proved that either no directionality exists in the evolution of specialists and generalists or that the generalists have evolved from specialist ancestors (Stireman III, 2005). In either case specialization definitely does not lead to an evolutionary dead end. That this trend is not an exception or restricted to a few taxa, is evidenced by the fact that such reports are available for organisms belonging to varied phyla including angiosperms, insects, fishes, mammals and microorganisms. This paper aims to prove that specialization does not definitely lead to an evolutionary dead end using evidences from relevant researches on floral plants, parasites, and mammals. As further evidence of this concept a plausible mechanism through which transition of specialist to generalist has been reported to occur will also be discussed. II. EVIDENCES FROM FLORAL PLANTS Floral plants depend on various species acting as pollen vectors for the completion of their reproductive cycle. Thus pollen biology is an integral part of study of evolution of floral plants. Darwin had stressed the importance of the role of pollen vectors in the reproduction of floral plants and its ecological and evolutionary significance (Harder and Aizen, 2010). Specialization of plants in context to their pollination apparatus and pollinators has major impact on the diversification of the species and is of paramount significance in its sympatric reproductive isolation, even leading to speciation (Gegear and Burns, 2007). Cope’s law has been traditionally applied to pollination biology as well and the hypothesis that specialized pollination systems have evolved from ancestral generalized systems has been accepted unchallenged. This has neither been established nor studied. However, among the recent reports challenging the universality of Cope’s law, some belong to highly specific dependence of floral plants and their pollination vectors. The genera Ruellia with approximately 300 species is characterized by diverse floral morphology and varied pollinators namely bees, hummingbirds, hawk moths, bats, butterflies etc.