MANAGEMENT

What if the manager's whole job could be understood as one idea? Organizations succeed when they optimize talent.
Management: Optimizing Talent for Organizational Effectiveness reframes the principles of management around the original DART model - Directing & Deploying, Attracting & Assessing, Rewarding & Retaining, and Teaching & Transforming talent. Every core management topic is here - planning and strategy, decision making and ethics, organizational structure and design, human resource management, culture and change, motivation and communication, leadership and teams, control and quality, innovation and entrepreneurship - each grounded in how real organizations attract, reward, develop, and keep the people who do the essential work.
Written for today's students, the text pairs classic management thought - Taylor to Drucker, Maslow to Mintzberg, the Hawthorne studies to the learning organization - with fully current coverage: a dedicated section on generative and agentic AI in every chapter, a capstone treatment of how AI is reclassifying work itself, and evidence drawn from 2025-2026 sources including the World Economic Forum's jobs projections and PwC's AI Jobs Barometer. The book's intellectual range runs wider than most: chapters open with paired epigraphs from classical voices - Plato, Confucius, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca - alongside modern management thinkers, a reminder that people have been solving the problems of organizing human effort for a very long time.
Each chapter ends with an original case study that puts students inside a real managerial dilemma - a warehouse where productivity metrics are destroying teamwork, a hiring push that cut corners, a dashboard that glowed green while the truth decayed - with discussion questions, applied exercises, and, in several cases, the student cast as the decision maker advising the leader. Features drawn from business, film, and literature - Toyota and Netflix, WeWork and Wells Fargo, The Karate Kid and Jane Austen - make the ideas stick. A simple economic through-line (Value ≈ Alignment × Engagement × Talent Value) shows why the four talent functions multiply rather than add - and why the gap between well-managed and poorly managed organizations widens so fast. Seventy-two professionally designed exhibits, a full glossary, and chapter-by-chapter DART Connections tie the framework together, and the final chapter turns the model on the reader: a personal development plan for managing the first talent you'll ever be responsible for - your own.
Designed for principles of management, management theory, and organizational behavior courses at the undergraduate and MBA-foundation level. A complete instructor package - instructor's manual, test bank with AACSB/NACE/SHRM alignment, lecture slides, and student activities - accompanies the text.

Thomas J. Norman, Ph.D. (University of Minnesota) is Professor of Management at California State University, Dominguez Hills, past Department Chair, Acting Associate Dean, and faculty founder of the CSUDH Innovation Incubator.