oll & Gillen, 1987). Therefore, Fayol's view on management will be discussed as beginning in the essay and then compare with other theorists' opinions to explore what management is on earth. That is, I will explore this question from the perspective of "what manager' job is".
             Fayol's general statement about management in many ways still remains valid after ninety years. He prefaced his famous definition of management by stating what he considered to be the key activities of any industrial undertaking. He outlines six such key activities as following: technical activities; commercial activities; financial activities; security activities; accounting activities and managerial activities. Fayol accepted that the first five were already sufficiently well known, but recognized at the outset that the sixth group of activities would require further explanation for his readers, while the other activities were all interdependent to some extent, there was no single one which was concerned with broad planning and resourcing. It was vitally necessary to isolate these last mentioned activities, said Fayol, and it is these to which he gave the name "managerial" (Cole, 1996).
             Henri Fayol, writing in the early years of the twentieth century, used his experience to theorize about the manager's job. He (1949) described the functions that managers perform. His five-fold classification has been used, with minor modifications, to the present day. First, managers must plan: set objectives, forecast, analyze problems, and make decisions about what should be done. The timescale for planning and the nature of the decisions will vary with the level of management. Secondly, managers organize: they determine what activities are necessary to achieve the objectives, they classify the work, divide it and assign it to groups an individuals. Thirdly, managers motivate: that is, they inspire their staff to contribute to t...