To manage once meant to hold a horse's reins
Before it meant spreadsheets and meetings, managing was horsemanship. The 15th-century French verb behind the English word described keeping the reins of a horse in hand, and Italian and Spanish cousins also carried that sense. All of them trace back to the Latin words for hand and act.
Those roots, manus and agere, sit beneath the French mesnager, the Italian maneggiare, meaning to handle tools or a horse, and the Spanish manejar. The noun management appeared in English in the 1590s, meaning to steer things by direction or manipulation. By the 1670s it could also mean handling something physically, and from 1739 it increasingly referred to the people in charge, the directors of an enterprise taken together, a usage that began in theatres.
Today the word covers the running of any organisation: companies through business administration, charities through nonprofit management, and governments through public administration. Big organisations usually stack managers in a pyramid of three tiers. At the top, boards and chief executives set strategy and policy. In the middle, regional, branch and department managers translate those goals for the level below. At the bottom, supervisors and team leaders direct everyday work, and despite doing much of the classic managerial job, they are usually counted as part of the workforce rather than management.
Thinkers have never agreed on a single definition. Henri Fayol, who lived from 1841 to 1925, listed forecasting and planning, organising, commanding, coordinating and controlling. Peter Drucker boiled the essential task down to two things, marketing and innovation. Fredmund Malik, born in 1944, calls it turning resources into utility, and Ghislain Deslandes describes a vulnerable force under pressure for results, wielding constraint, imitation and imagination.
Whatever the definition, management involves people, not machines: setting a mission and rules and motivating human beings, which is why it is distinct from operating equipment or herding animals. It happens in lawful and unlawful enterprises alike, and some argue it applies to improving one's own life and relationships too. Universities teach it through degrees in management and business or public administration, social scientists study leadership and organisational adaptation, and recent decades have seen a push for evidence-based management.
Source: Management
