Management of Walking (Wandering) Around

Better organizational communications would help in effective leading and supervising the employees and result to bottom line performance of an organization.
Identifying possible small problem proactively for preventive measures before those problems would become into mass destructive that would have disastrous impact.

MBWA (Management by Wandering Around) is a management approach for managing upward communication from low level employees to top level management to generating useful information for problems solving
In order to obtain effective communications, there two things have to do:

First, manager should facilitate upward communication with open-door policy; frequently having lunch or coffee with employees that would make upward communication easier.
Mangers must also motivate people to provide valid information and suggestions that could be helping in problem solving and the information and suggestions should not be brushed off consistently. Useful upward communications must be reinforced and not punished.

Second, managers frequently pay visits to plants, work sites, and fields, s/he must really think about and respond to employee suggestions, and distribute summaries of new ideas and practices inspired by employee suggestions and actions. Many executives and managers practice MBWA, the term coined by Ed Carlson of United Airlines, refers simply to getting out of the office, walking around, and talking frequently and informally with employees (Ruch, Corporate Communications).

Our ex CE Mr. Tung and current CE Donald Tsang, both often pay visits to the communities of HK for public hearing.

managemnt by walking around:

it is from the Concurrent Contorl (a type of Contorl) where it means manager checking the error by personally directly interrupting with the employee in the working area. This type of contorl takes place when the problem is already occurs, but not much waste and negative effective has happened.

2006-11-23 10:08:52 補充：
The advantage of "Walking around" : manager alert minor error before it became uncontrollable. There is delay between corrective action and occurance of problem. He can make corrective action immediately and REDUCE THE EXPENSIVE COST of corrective action.