What Effective General Managers Really Do (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition) Review
John Kotter is Professor of Leadership at the Harvard Business School. He is the author of several books and articles into leadership and general management. This article was originally published in the November-December 1982 issue of the Harvard Business Review; this On-Point version contains a March-April 1999 retrospective commentary by the author.
This article reports on the author's study, between 1976 and 1981, into 15 successful general managers in nine corporations. He does this by a describing a typical day in the life of a successful executive. On the basis of his research into the daily behavior of general managers Kotter identifies 12 typical patterns. Kotter concludes that it is hard to fit the general manager's behavior into categories like planning, organizing, controlling, directing, or staffing. In order to understand the general managers' behavior it is fundamental to recognize the two fundamental challenges and dilemmas in their jobs: (1) Figuring out what to do despite uncertainty and an enormous amount of potentially relevant information; (2) Getting things done through a large and diverse group of people despite having little direct control over most of them. General managers use agenda setting and network building to tackle those two challenges. Kotter discusses both these tools in detail. He also explains how general managers use their entire network of relationships to implement their agendas. Kotter then continues to discuss the 12 patterns found in his study and what the implications of these patterns are. "First and foremost, putting someone in a general manager's job who does not already know the business or the people involved ... is risky. Second, management training courses ... probably overemphasize formal tools, unambiguous problems, and situations that deal simplistically with human relationships. Third, people who are new in general management positions can probably be gotten up to speed more effectively than is the norm today." Kotter complements this On-Point version with a short commentary, written in 1999.
Great, surprising article on the inconsistency between the textbook's definition of management and the actual behavior of general managers. He provides practical insights and advise on managerial effectiveness. This article is recommended to people moving into management and MBA-students. For readers who like this article I recommend John Kotter's 1999-book 'On What Leaders Really Do'. The article is written in simple US-English.
What Effective General Managers Really Do (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition) Overview
This is an enhanced edition of HBR article 99208, originally published in March/April 1999. HBR OnPoint articles save you time by enhancing an original Harvard Business Review article with an overview that draws out the main points and an annotated bibliography that points you to related resources. This enables you to scan, absorb, and share the management insights with others. A gap has existed between the conventional wisdom about how managers work and the actual behavior of effective managers. Business textbooks suggest that managers operate best when they carefully control their time and work within highly structured environments, but observations of real managers indicate that those who spend their days that way may be undermining their effectiveness. In this HBR Classic, John Kotter explains that managers who limit their interactions to orderly, focused meetings actually shut themselves off from vital information and relationships. He shows how seemingly wasteful activities like chatting in hallways and having impromptu meetings are, in fact, quite efficient. General managers face two fundamental challenges: figuring out what to do despite an enormous amount of potentially relevant information, and getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them. To tackle these challenges, effective general managers develop flexible agendas and broad networks of relationships. Their agendas enable them to react opportunistically to the flow of events around them because a common framework guides their decisions about where and when to intervene. And their networks allow them to have quick and pointed conversations that give the general managers influence well beyond their formal chain of command. Originally published in 1982, the article's ideas about time management are all the more useful for today's hard-pressed executives. Kotter has added a retrospective commentary highlighting the article's relevance to current concepts of leadership.
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