What Leaders Really Do (HBR OnPoint Enhanced Edition)

"Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think." Kotter believes that leadership and management are complementary systems of action, and that both are essential for business success. Management is about coping with complexity, while leadership is about coping with change. Both system of action involves decision-making, but each in a different way. The author explains the differences by comparing setting direction vs. planning and budgeting, aligning people vs. organizing and staffing, and motivating people vs. controlling and problem solving. He uses Lou Gerstner at American Express, Chuck Trowbridge and Bob Crandall at Eastman Kodak, and Richard Nicolosi at Procter & Gamble as leadership examples. Kotter then continues to discuss the attributes required for leadership. He believes that a significant challenge early in careers (during their twenties and thirties) are most important. Later in their careers they need broadening, which means growing beyond the narrow base that characterizes most managerial careers. Kotter concludes that corporations should put an emphasis on creating challenging opportunities for relatively young employees. This could involve decentralization, since that pushes responsibility to lower areas in the organization. "Institutionalizing a leadership-centered culture is the ultimate act of leadership."

In his 1982-article 'What General Managers Really Do' Kotter researched how general managers spend their time. In this article, Kotter compares leadership with management. He uses the three main activities of leaders and managers for comparisons. Highly recommended to leaders, managers, people moving into management, and MBA-students. The author uses simple US-English.


The difference between leadership and management   October 11, 2001
Gerard Kroese (The Netherlands)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

John Kotter is Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Harvard Business School and a leading authority on leadership. He is author of several books on leadership. This Harvard Business Review-article was published in 1990.

The main difference between leadership and management is that "management is about coping with complexity ... leadership, in contrast, is about coping with change." Kotter explains the differences between leadership and management by making three comparisons: setting a direction vs. planning and budgeting, aligning people vs. organizing and staffing, and motivating people vs. controlling and problem solving. While discussing the differences, the author also discusses the relationships between leadership and management. He also touches slightly on the character requirements of leaders and managers. The author uses Lou Gerstner at American Express, Chuck Trowbridge and Bob Crandall at Eastman Kodak, and Richard Nicolosi at Procter & Gamble respectively as examples for these comparisons. "The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other." In the final paragraphs, Kotter provides some insights in how leadership and leaders are developed. He also explains how organizations can "do a better-than-average job of developing leaders", such as pushing responsibility lower in an organization, create more challenging jobs, stress growth through new products and services, support and attention from senior executives, etc.

This article provides a very clear introduction between the two distinctive and complementary systems of action for leadership and management. Weakness is that it does not provide new insights into leadership and does not provide a detailed framework on how to create leadership within organizations. I would recommend this article to people who are moving into management and first-year MBAs. The article is written in simple US-English. Please note that this article runs on Acrobat eBook Reader software and is not a .pdf-file.