Business: Principles of Management Assignment Guide

Effective management within organizations is demonstrated by understanding the four main categories of management responsibilities:

• planning
• organizing
• leading 
• controlling

As you gather background information and data, keep a running list of relevant words, phrases, key concepts, and subjects you encounter to use in future searches related your specific business, your industry, your consumer; your target market.  Make a list of terms and  variations. Different authors use different terms and having this list will help you cover all your research bases.

Examples of Search Terms and Variations

• entrepreneur; entrepreneurship
• management; manager; operations management; project management; strategic management
• business; business model; business structure; small business; micro-business
• company; corporation
• personnel; employee; staff
• profit; profit margin
• consumer; target-market; market segmentation

Advanced search strategies can save you time and narrow your search from tens of thousands of articles to dozens.

Remember when searching, put quotes or parentheses around phrases of more than one word to search for the phrase instead of the individual words separately.

• Boolean Operators (AND, OR, and NOT) to help you narrow or expand your results
  • Searching for restaurant AND delivery will give you results with both words present. Therefore, your results are fewer.
  • Using OR between similar keywords restaurant OR cafe will give you results that include either word alone or both words together. Therefore, your results are greater. A search for will retrieve either or both terms.

    The NOT operator gives you results from only one of your words -  delivery NOT mail - . Therefore, your results are fewer. Searching  eliminate articles containing the word mail from the results.

  • Most databases have an Advanced Search option that provdes you with three or more boxes to insert keywords, phrases, names etc. and options to choose AND, OR, and NOT from a drop-down menu.

• Wildcard Searching - Truncation will save you time by searching or variations of a root word

  • Adding an asterisk to a root word, manag* means you will locate articles or information for ALL variations of the root, manag*

    • manage, manages, manager, managers, managing, management

Reach out to a librarian if you have any questions about finding information in the library databases. Use the Ask-a-Librarian button at the left, or check beneath my profile pic below to see if I'm online for a Chat or feel free to reach out to me via email as well! I'm happy to help!