Managing, like all the other practices-where medicine, music composition, engineering, accountancy, or even baseball is an art, it is know-how. It is doing things in light of realities of a situation. Yet mangers can work better by using the organized knowledge about management. It is this knowledge that continues 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 science. To be sure, the science underlying managing is fairly crude and inexact because the many variables that managers deal with are extremely complex. Nevertheless, such management knowledge can certainly improve managerial practice. Physicians without the advantages of science would be little more than witch doctors. Executives who attempt to manage without management science trust to luck, intuition, or what they did in the past.
In managing, as in any other field, unless practitioners are to learn by trail and error and it has been said that mangers’ error are their subordinates’ trail, there is no place they can turn to for the meaningful guidance other than the accumulated knowledge underlying their practice.