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.