Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture? Part A

Your Corporate Strategy:  It Just Doesn’t Matter?      Part 23a

First, I think John Cotter’s article in the Harvard Business Review clarifies much about the constantly misunderstood difference between Leadership and Management:

“….management is a set of well-known processes, like planning, budgeting, structuring jobs, staffing jobs, measuring performance and problem-solving, which help an organization to predictably do what it knows how to do well. Management helps you to produce products and services as you have promised, of consistent quality, on budget, day after day, week after week. In organizations of any size and complexity, this is an enormously difficult task. We constantly underestimate how complex this task really is, especially if we are not in senior management jobs. So, management is crucial — but it's not leadership.

Leadership is entirely different. It is associated with taking an organization into the future, finding opportunities that are coming at it faster and faster and successfully exploiting those opportunities. Leadership is about vision, about people buying in, about empowerment and, most of all, about producing useful change. Leadership is not about attributes, it's about behavior. And in an ever-faster-moving world, leadership is increasingly needed from more and more people, no matter where they are in a hierarchy. The notion that a few extraordinary people at the top can provide all the leadership needed today is ridiculous and it's a recipe for failure.”

http://blogs.hbr.org/kotter/2013/01/management-is-still-not-leadership.html

Next: Why Are C-level Roles So Crucial To Culture? Part B