Power, success, and organizational effectiveness.
Explore the source record for details and available documents.
Hospital Administration↗
Biomedical subjects
J P Kotter
Publications and source records attributed to J P Kotter.
What leaders really do.
Leadership is different from management, but not for the reasons most people think. Leadership isn't mystical and mysterious. It has nothing to do with having "charisma" or other exotic personality traits. It is not the province of a chosen few. Nor is leadership necessarily better than management or a replacement for it. Rather, leadership and management are two distinctive and complementary systems of action. Each has its own function and characteristic activities. Both are necessary for success in today's business environment. Management is about coping with complexity. Its practices and procedures are largely a response to the emergence of large, complex organizations in the twentieth century. Leadership, by contrast, is about coping with change. Part of the reason it has become so important in recent years is that the business world has become more competitive and more volatile. More change always demands more leadership. Most U. S. corporations today are overmanaged and underled. They need to develop their capacity to exercise leadership. Successful corporations don't wait for leaders to come along. They actively seek out people with leadership potential and expose them to career experiences designed to develop that potential. Indeed, with careful selection, nurturing, and encouragement, dozens of people can play important leadership roles in a business organization. But while improving their ability to lead, companies should remember that strong leadership with weak management is no better, and is sometimes actually worse, than the reverse. The real challenge is to combine strong leadership and strong management and use each to balance the other.
Administrative Personnel↗
Choosing strategies for change.
Change, though traumatic, can be good for some people, but many others, especially in their daily employment, feel threatened by any alteration in the status quo. Organizations by their very nature must change, and increasingly rapidly--and managers must implement changes and overcome resistance to them. Here are four basic reasons people resist change, various ways of dealing with that resistance, and a guide to the kinds of approaches to use with different types of opposition.
Adaptation, Psychological↗
Managing your boss: a compatible relationship with your superior is essential to being effective in your job.
Good managers recognize that a relationship with a boss involves mutual dependence and that, if it is not managed well, they cannot be effective in their jobs. They also recognize that the boss-subordinate relationship is not like the one between a parent and a child, in that the burden for managing the relationship should not and cannot fall entirely on the boss. Bosses are only human; their wisdom and maturity are not always greater than their subordinates'. Effective managers see managing the relationship with the boss as part of their job. As a result, they take time and energy to develop a relationship that is consonant with both persons' styles and assets and that meets the most critical needs of each.
Administrative Personnel↗
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 more 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.
Administrative Personnel↗