For a New Approach to Management
Posted by Ahmad Barirani in 
While an important body of knowledge is produced by great management scholars, my personal experience leaves me with in the feeling that the industry is still in the Stone Age when it comes to understanding and implementing sound leadership principles. Matter of fact, management theory is seldom used in the industry. This might be because a great number of managers or team leaders do not have the proper training to grasp the day-to-day subtleties of management. They have been selected to these positions because of their natural political and people skills. As a result, they perform management tasks based on the “set of management tools” that their personal experience has given to them. It is thus unavoidable that they react more instinctively than with deep understanding of what is going on in their environment.
Surprisingly, this reality does not give result to catastrophic results as projects always end up being delivered and business units end up being profitable. Would it mean that management is not necessarily a science but that it has features of an art? Certainly, as it is taught as a first rule to any management training program. So, complex calculations and the use of mathematics is not a necessity when it comes to leadership; only the application of predefined recipes is enough to give acceptable results.
But here lies the problem: everything in the world is becoming increasingly rational. Customers, firms, and industries are becoming rational. This tendency will unavoidably lead to situations where process optimization and waste elimination is the first priority of every organization. In order to achieve these goals, firms will have to use mathematical (and scientific) tools to take decisions. These decisions will translate into a set of objectives which will in turn require expertise in order to be implemented with success. In this new world, leaders will need to be expertise in scientific management rather that rule of thumb management. In scientific management, I do not include only the application of rational or mathematical models for the supervision of technical issues but also the application of social psychology for a better coordination of human resources.
In world of increasing complexity, the acquisition of competences in both these branches of scientific management will need intense training and as opposed to “on the field training” in current state of affairs. In tomorrow’s world, managers will not be craftsmen or politicians. They will be scientists that will perform planning as in operations management rather than planning as in political campaigns.
Dynamic change of metatags in MasterPage-inherited .aspx page
To change a page’s metatags in codebehind (dynamically), use of HtmlMeta class from System.Web.UI.HtmlControls namespace will do.
Here’s a snippet to change the page’s keywords metatag for example:
HtmlMeta keywords = new HtmlMeta();
keywords.Name = “keywords”;
keywords.Content = “montreal, cinema, hockey, tourism”;
Page.Header.Controls.Add(keywords);
Only, if we apply this code to change metatags in a page that inherits from a MasterPage which has those metatags, then we will find ourselves in an ambiguous situation of having duplicate metatags (duplicate keywords metatag for example).
To avoid this situation, the MasterPage’s metatag must first be removed from the Page.Header.Controls collection.
Marco Follow
Marco Follow is a Twitter auto follow tools designed at supporting word-of-mouth marketing effort. Marco Follow offers the following combination of features: 1) auto follow, 2) auto retweet, and 3) auto unfollow. Marco Follow does not interfere with normal daily use of Twitter features and is aimed at performing those redundant tasks on Twitter. All Marco Follow features target a set of keywords specified by the user. As a result, Marco Follow will build and engage a strong Twitter network that is centered around the user’s subject of interest.
The Relationship Between Network Theory and Finance
Asked about the corrupt behavior of a great number of senior managers in the financial sector, proponents of free market have no choice but to admit the necessity of regulations in the industry. After all, the temptation to unethical action is too high when it comes to manage big corporation’s finances: with little consequences (merely more than blame), quasi-frauds can secure an important quantity of wealth for the perpetrator.
Now, it becomes obvious that IT is a tool of predilection when it comes to recording and reviewing financial activity. Only, the number of transactions in one day alone is so high that all chain of transactions cannot be tracked. Instead of looking at all transactions, one must then supervise some transactions over others for the sake of practicality.
For this purpose, a large body of techniques and tools based on pattern recognition, heuristics and social network theories must be available to the financial sector’s regulators in order to effectively supervise important financial activity. We can now only wait before players emerge.