This article is about an interview with Shoji Shiba, it indicates changes which managers are facing in Indian industry. Meanwhile, this article shows several different cases and practices of management theories in the following areas: managerial functions, types and levels of management, managerial roles and skills, and challenges for management in a global environment, especially ideas about building a competitive advantage.
Managerial functions Shoji Shiba indicates that managers in Indian industry today conscious that there are significant changes in the environment of manufacturing. Thus, they began pay more attention to cooperate themselves with these changes, including global changes, suppliers, customers and partners, instead of only production itself. According to the management theories (Waddell et al. p 9-11), this is part of planning function. More specifically, when managers realise the changes around the manufacturing, they began to redesign and plan the goals they actually pursue, and then deciding how to align themselves to other organizations to achieve the goals. This also relates to the organising function. Because managers should group organisational members into different work teams according to different kinds of job they do and different relationships in the entire manufacturing chain they responsible for: suppliers, customers, upstream and downstream partners. In these experts of the interview, leading function and controlling function are not directly involved.
Levels and types of managers Over the last five years, Indian manufacturing sector witnessed a significant growth from “shopfloor improvements to new manufacturing processes to R&D and new product development”. It can be seen that different types and levels of managers have been involved, which from first-line managers