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Management Language and Management Action
Vaill, Peter B.
10/1  (Fall 1967): 51-58

This article focuses on the relationship between an organization and its employees. This article suggests a broad strategy by which organization and employees can be kept together in the process of improving managerial effectiveness, whether that process takes place in a training atmosphere such as a classroom or a conference, or whether it takes place more informally through the efforts of one manager to improve his effectiveness as he goes about his work. The key concept here is "action," by which will be meant any behavior by the manager that is directed toward a goal. When a manager "takes action" he connects himself, so to speak, to the person or persons toward whom his efforts are directed. Therefore, the process of taking action is a process of bridging what is within the manager with the people in the world outside him. You know very little about this bridging process. Specifically, the everyday language you employ for talking about this process seems to be inadequate at present to the task of understanding what happens when a manager "takes action."

 

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