What effective general managers really do

A rather large gap exists between the conventional wisdom on management functions, tools, and systems on the one hand and actual managerial behavior on the other. The former is usually discussed in terms of planning, controlling, staffing, organizing, and directing; the latter is characterized by long hours, fragmented episodes, and oral communication. Actual behavior, as a study of successful general managers shows, looks less systematic, more informal, less reflective, more reactive, less well organized, and more frivolous than a student of strategic planning systems, MIS, or organizational design would ever expect. The gap is important and disturbing for many reasons. First of all, it raises serious questions about the kind of formal planning, performance appraisal, and other systems that are commonly in use today In a similar way it raises questions about management education, which usually relies heavily on management “theory” and which is currently producing mote than 60,000 new MBAs each year. Furthermore, the gap makes it difficult for executives to coach younger managers and makes it hard for them to know how they might improve their own effectiveness. The study was conducted by John P. Kotter, professor of organizational behavior at the Harvard Business School. This article, which is adapted from his book The General Managers (Free Press, 1982), is his fourth in HBR. His last article, which he coauthored with John J. Gabarro, “Managing Your Boss,” appeared in our January-February 1980 issue and won the McKinsey Award for the second best HBR article of that year.