Managing: Science or Art?

Managing like all other practices-whether medicine, music composition, engineering, accountancy, or even baseball-is an art. It is know-how. It is doing things in light of the realities of a situation. Yet managers can work better by using the organized knowledge about management. It is this knowledge that constitutes a science. Thus, managing as practice is an art; the organized knowledge underlying the practice may be referred to as a science. In this context, science and art are not mutually exclusive; they are complementary.
As science improves, so should art, as has happened in the physical and biological sciences. To be sure, the science underlying managing is fairly crude and inexact because the many variables that managers deal with are extremely complex. Neverthlers, such management knowledge can certainly improve managerial practice. Physicians without the advantage of science would be little more than witch doctors. Executives who attempt, or what they did in the past.
In managing, as many any other field, unless practitioners are to learn by trial and error (and it has been said that managers' errors are their subordinates' trials), there is no place they can turn to for meaningful guidance other the accumulated knowledge underlying their practice.
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Fundamentals of Management : Introduction [BBA 2305]