This sometimes confuses those unfamiliar with the title. We are not teaching MBA students how to be managers. Management science is a discipline that attempts to aid managerial decision making by applying a scientific approach to managerial problems that involves quantitative factors. Management Science is concerned with providing advice, analysis and support to decision makers. The science part means that this is based on a scientific approach, looking systematically at what the aims may be, how scarce resources can be used most effectively, and how good ideas can be implemented.
Business analysis is used to help the organization design better systems and make better decisions.
Just as important is the ability to think creatively, and to communicate well. Effective management scientists are in close contact with their clients, not stuck in a back room away from the action. The history of modern management has been characterized by the swing of a pendulum, propelled to one end of its arc by the work of Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, and then pulled to the other by the tenets of humanistic management. But today s organizations are taking the best of these two schools and from them synthesizing new ways to manage. Decision making is the most fundamental function of management.