Short answers, pulled from the story.
Management is the administration of organizations, whether businesses, nonprofit organizations, or government bodies. It is the process of managing the resources of businesses, governments, and other organizations through fields such as business administration, nonprofit management, and public administration.
Larger organizations generally have three hierarchical levels arranged in a pyramid: senior management, middle management, and line management. Senior management includes the board of directors and a CEO or president, middle management includes branch and department managers, and line management includes supervisors and team leaders who oversee regular employees.
The English verb manage has roots in the fifteenth-century French verb mesnager, which referred to holding the reins of a horse in hand. It also relates to the Italian maneggiare and Spanish manejar, all deriving from the Latin words manus, meaning hand, and agere, meaning to act.
Henri Fayol, who lived from 1841 to 1925, said management operates through five basic functions: planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling. He stated that to manage is to forecast and plan, to organize, to command, to coordinate, and to control.
In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Adam Smith described the efficient organization of work through division of labour using a pin factory. A single worker could produce 200 pins per day, but with 10 specialists analyzing each manufacturing step, production rose to 48,000 pins per day.
The Harvard Business School offered the first Master of Business Administration degree, the MBA, in 1921. Earlier, J. Duncan wrote the first college management textbook in 1911, reflecting the rise of formal management education in the early 20th century.
Evidence-based management is an emerging movement to use the current, best evidence in management and decision-making, part of the larger movement toward evidence-based practices. It rests on three principles: peer-reviewed research evidence, judgment and experience from contextual practice, and the preferences and values of those affected.