Written Report on ‘What Effective General Managers Really Do�? by John P. Kotter Essay Example
Written report on ‘What effective General Managers Really Do” by John P. Kotter
MAIN POINTS
(1) General Managers face a challenge of deciding what to do when they are constantly being faced with a huge amount of potentially important information. In order to tackle this challenge, effective General Managers develop and implement flexible agendas. GMs create their agendas both consciously and unconsciously through a mostly internal process. They set goals and loosely connect them to the plan of their long-, medium-, and short-term responsibilities. Therefore, an agenda of a typical GM differs from the formal plans produced by the organization. Such flexible agenda of a GM differs not in a way that it is incompatible with the one of the organization, but in the following way. Namely, formal plans contain detailed financial numbers, focus mostly on short and moderate time horizon and are logical, explicit and rigorous. On the other had, GM’s agenda contains strategies and plans for the business, focuses primarily on the immediate future and longer run, and is made of goals and plans that are not explicitly connected. In addition, in order to update their agendas GMs continually gather information received mostly from discussions with others, rather than reports and books (see main point 2)
(2) Another challenge of General Managers is to be able to do things through a wide and diverse set of people even though they don’t execute direct control over most of them. In order to successfully face this challenge successful General Managers develop a broad network of relationships. They spend a lot of time and effort developing cooperative relationships with both external (government, press, public, suppliers, competitors, etc.) and internal (bosses, peers, immediate subordinates and subordinates of subordinates) actors. Therefore, such network is not consistent with the formal organizational structure. Network-building is taking a lot of time at the beginning but
MAIN POINTS
(1) General Managers face a challenge of deciding what to do when they are constantly being faced with a huge amount of potentially important information. In order to tackle this challenge, effective General Managers develop and implement flexible agendas. GMs create their agendas both consciously and unconsciously through a mostly internal process. They set goals and loosely connect them to the plan of their long-, medium-, and short-term responsibilities. Therefore, an agenda of a typical GM differs from the formal plans produced by the organization. Such flexible agenda of a GM differs not in a way that it is incompatible with the one of the organization, but in the following way. Namely, formal plans contain detailed financial numbers, focus mostly on short and moderate time horizon and are logical, explicit and rigorous. On the other had, GM’s agenda contains strategies and plans for the business, focuses primarily on the immediate future and longer run, and is made of goals and plans that are not explicitly connected. In addition, in order to update their agendas GMs continually gather information received mostly from discussions with others, rather than reports and books (see main point 2)
(2) Another challenge of General Managers is to be able to do things through a wide and diverse set of people even though they don’t execute direct control over most of them. In order to successfully face this challenge successful General Managers develop a broad network of relationships. They spend a lot of time and effort developing cooperative relationships with both external (government, press, public, suppliers, competitors, etc.) and internal (bosses, peers, immediate subordinates and subordinates of subordinates) actors. Therefore, such network is not consistent with the formal organizational structure. Network-building is taking a lot of time at the beginning but