What Effective General Managers Really Do

A gap has existed between the conventional wisdom about how managers work and the actual behavior of effective managers. Business texbooks suggest tha tmanagers operate best when they carefully control their time and work within highly structured environments, but observations of real managers indicate that those who spend their days that way may be undermining effectiveness.

In this “Harvard Business Review Classic”, John Cotter explains that managers who limit their interactions to orderly, focused meetings actually shut themselves off from vital information and relationships. He shows how seemingly wasteful activities like chatting in hallways and having impromtu meetings are, in fact, quite efficient.

General managers face two fundamental challenges: figuring out what to do despite an enormous amount of potentially relevant information, and getting things done through a large and diverse set of people despite having little direct control over most of them. To tackle these challenges, effective general managers develop flexible agendas and broad networks of relationships.

Their agendas enable them to react opportunistically to the flow of events around them because a common framework guides their decisions about where and when to intervene. And their networks allow them to have quick and pointed conversations that give the general managers influence well beyond their formal chain of command.

Originally published in 1982, the article’s ideas about time management are all the more useful for today’s hard-pressed executives. Kotter has added a retrospective commentary highliting the article’s relevance to current concepts of leadership.

Harvard Business School Publishing

BMW: Hot Cars, Hotter Executives

Former Executives Make Their Mark at Rival Auto Makers

Frankfurt

Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, long a favorite of yuppie drivers, is turning out to be pretty popular among rival auto makers, too – for producing executives. Hoping to capture a little of BMW’s stunning success the past few years, European car companies have scooped up a steady stream of talent from the Bavarian company. In their new companies, the former BMW brethren are now preaching their gospel of success: Making good cars isn’t enough these days. Everything has to focus on building brand image.

There is little secret to what makes BMW executives the darlings of personnel managers: The company they helped run seems like it can do no wrong. BMW’s sales have risen nonstop for years, and it has a knack for picking successful cars. What’s more, BMW enjoys some of the fattest margins in the business because its reputation for quality allows it to charge premium prices.

BMW’s success, most experts agree, comes from its dedication to branding. By focusing design, product selection and advertising with brand uppermost in mind, the Bavarians have created what is arguably the most clearly defined public perception in the auto industry – sporty luxury. According to a recent survey in Europe by Auto Motor & Sport magazine, more people bought BMW cars because of the name than any other auto.

But the root of BMW’s success goes beyond a straightforward formula for focusing on brand. It also has something to do with people who work there – there is a BMW “breed.” Top company executives come primarily from Bavaria, home to some of the best schools in Germany, and, typically, they have attended the prestigious Technical University of Munich. Unlike a lot of carmakers, who promote people from a variety of fields to the chairman’s seat, BMW favors engineers for that post. Once at a company, they are inculcated with the importance of branding, a legacy of Eberhard von Kuenheim who, as chairman in the early 1980s, developed the “sport luxury” vision for BMW. Now young executives are taken on retreats where they are infused with a passion for detail

“We learned about consistent brand management where sales, marketing, design and production are all taken together,” said the Wolfgang Reitzle, now head of Ford Motor Co.’s luxury-brand division, the Premier Auto Group. “Other companies have allowed themselves to get distracted.”

“Brand management will be the thing of the future for the auto industry and that’s why people coming out of the BMW school are obviously in high demand,” said Carl Peter Forster, a former BMW board member whom General Motors Corp. chose to run Adam Opel AG.

BMW puts the talent outflow down to a lean management pyramid that tends to lead young people to high-level jobs. For many executives, it is easier to work at another company than to work for someone younger than they are. “We attract the best college graduates in Germany,” said Michael Ganal, BMW’s management board member for sales and marketing. “But we have a certain kind of pyramid so you can’t give everybody their dream job.”

The International Herald Tribune

Notes

to scoop up– заполучить кого-либо (что-либо), обойдя конкурента

brethren –plural of “brother”

to preach a gospel of success –to teach others how to succees