[MUSIC] In this segment we are going to talk about management versus leadership. This course is called Managing the Company of the Future, not leading the company of the future. And I want to make sure we understand why I am using the word management because for many people the management is a bit of a sort of an old fashioned word. So a couple of definitions. Let's just get started with definitions. What is leadership? What do we mean by leadership? You can think of, you know, very famous leaders over the years like Winston Churchill Richard Branson, we can think of Steve Jobs more recently. Everyone's got their own favorite examples of leaders. What is it that makes these people leaders? Well, I'm going to give you a definition. Leadership is a process of social influence. Okay? What do I mean by that? I mean that a leader is somebody who attracts followers. Somebody who by virtue of their own skills, their own abilities, their own charisma, the things that they say, the things that they do attract people to follow them. And of course it's possible to be a leader who is attracting followers for a very dangerous cause. But obviously we're going to focus particularly on leaders who attract followers around worthy causes and financially lucrative causes. That's what leadership means in a business context. And, of course we need lots of leaders. We need people who attract others to a particular point of view. What is management? Well, here actually there's a couple of ways of defining the term. We can go back to the original way of defining management. There was a famous frame, framework put together by a couple of American management writers, Koontz and O'Donnell. And they had a, a view of management which was around planning, organizing, controlling, and directing and budgeting. They focused on the functions of management because what they did was they observed managers, and they observed that managers spend a lot of time planning stuff, organizing stuff, and directing stuff. That's not wrong. But for me it's actually quite a limiting definition, because the trouble with it is, it focuses on what managers do, rather than why they do it in the first place. So, I actually prefer a much simpler definition, which is that management is getting work done through other people. That is what, for me, management is all about. Basically management says, there are things that organizations are trying to do which you cannot do as a set of individuals. We need to gather people together to collaborate, to do something they couldn't do on their own. Management is essentially the art of getting work done through others, getting resources together, people, acknowledging money. To do stuff that they couldn't do on their own. And management in that respect is of course fundamentally different to leadership but at the same time it's complementary. So we need leaders and we need managers. We've got these two different words Management and Leadership, and it's worth just reflecting on how we ended up comparing and contrasting these two points of view about what executives do. And we have to go back 20 years or so to the, the sort of start of the leadership revolution. And there's two gentlemen in particular who are worth observing here. John Kotter, a Harvard business school professor, Warren Bennis from Southern California. Both of them very much kind of gurus who led the charge on saying we need to take leadership seriously in organizations. And, and they were right to do so. There's no question that we need leaders to help our organizations perform better. But, there was a catch because by building up leadership, they did it at the expense of management. You can see here that when you look at the words that Kotter and Bennis use to describe leaders and managers, they're playing a game. They're playing kind of the oldest game out there which is to build up x you have to knock down y. By building up leadership, they knocked down management. They put all of the kind of the attractive and interesting things about the executive's job around managing change and coping with complexity into the leadership bucket. And they put all the kind of, the, the leftover stuff, the boring stuff, into the management package. And if you think about it, that is really not, not the right way to do things. Because essentially, management and leadership, as I've said, are really both kind of two sides of the same coin, two horses pulling the same cart. We need both of them. And I think what happened is that, because of the success of people like Kotter and Bennis, in building up leadership as a, as a sort of a state of mind, they managed to persuade people that action management wasn't that important. If I want to be a leader that means I can't be a manager. Needless to say, that is not a helpful way of looking at things. I'll just give you one more example of exactly the same point. A chap called Andrew Sturdy, he's a friend of mine at Warwick Business School. He did a study a few years back where he asked his executive MBA students to describe the work that they do. And these, these are all people who are working with, with subordinates in important professional jobs. And when they described the work they did they talked about themselves as entrepreneurs, as change agents, as accountants, as engineers. None of them used the word manager to describe themselves. And when you push them on this, you say, Well, why, why didn't you use the word manager? Their answer was essentially, we don't like the word manager. I equate management with bossy, insecure, weak people trying to intimidate. They had several other juicy quotes that you can see here as well. Essentially they said, this is a bad word. I don't want to be seen to be a manager because most people think of management as controlling, and leadership as liberating. So we mustn't get hung up on words. We really mustn't because, in fact, some languages like the Scandinavian languages they don't even separate the words management and leadership. What we need to do is to be clear. That we need leaders and managers. We need to have both. It is a false dichotomy to say that some people are leaders, and other people are managers. Essentially, what we need to do is to become better at figuring out when to be a leader, and when to be a manager. We shouldn't pretend that somehow these are different things. So for me. We all have to think about both of these activities. This course is essentially about the managing part of the equation. Why? Because I want to address the balance. I want to make sure that the whole issue around managing, about working more effectively, getting work done through others is given equal prominence. To the stuff about leadership and influencing the people around us. So that is all I'm going to say about the leadership versus management debate. Clearly over the course of the rest of this course, we could easily throw the word leadership in here and quite a lot of times it would actually be appropriate to do so. But I'm going to be consistent, I'm going to use the word management and managing throughout, because that is really the kind of the focal point of this whole course.
