A NEW PERSPECTIVE FOR MANAGEMENT
How is management going to meet the environmental challenges and paradigm shift out-lined above? Management is generally considered to have three major dimensions—technical, conceptual, and human. The technical dimension consists of the manager's functional expertise in accounting or engineering or marketing and increasingly in information technology. There seems little question that today's managers are competent in their functional specialization. When it comes to IT (information technology), although there has been and will be peaks and valleys in the dot-corn firms and the big high-tech firms, there is still a shortage of IT and other types of technically oriented talent now and in the foreseeable future in the United States and abroad. Overall, however, although managers are certainly more aware and becoming competent in their functional/technical component, few today would question that, at least in the past, most practicing managers either ignored the conceptual and human dimensions of their jobs or made some overly simplistic assumptions.