Introduction

A well-managed organization must be effective and efficient in the short and the long run, and the role of management is to make that happen.

In order to achieve a well-managed organization, I have found that four roles need to be performed, which I summarize as: (P)roducing the results for which the organization exists, which makes the organization effective; (A)dministering, for efficiency; (E)ntrepreneuring, for leading change; and (I)ntegrating the parts of the organization for long-term viability.

Think of the four roles as vitamins. For the health of an organization, these four “vitamins” are necessary, and together they are sufficient for the organization to be well managed. If one or more vitamins is deficient, a disease – mismanagement – will result, manifested by falling market share, lower profits, slow reaction to market changes and/or high turnover of staff, etc.

If one, two, or three roles are performed well and the others meet the minimum threshold of competence, a managerial style will be manifested. When (I)ntegration is among the roles a manager performs exceptionally well, a leadership style will emerge. (Why this seems to be true will become clear in this book.)

When one role is performed well, but the three others are performed below the necessary threshold of competence necessary for the task or not at all, a specific, predictable mismanagement style, depending on which roles are lacking, will result.

I have found that no one person can perform all four roles at the same time. A normal person can perform one or two roles at a time. Some, the rare ones, can perform three roles. A manager may be able to perform each of the four roles at various times and in the service of various goals, but no one can excel at all four roles concurrently in every situation.

Thus, my premise, which I develop in this book, is that the ideal leader, manager, or executive – ideal in the sense that he can fulfill by himself all the roles necessary for the long- and short-term effectiveness and efficiency of an organization – does not and cannot exist. And that is the problem with contemporary management literature: it presents what the executive should do, (because that is what the organization needs,) even though no one can do it. All the books and textbooks that try to teach us to be perfect managers, leaders, or executives are based on the erroneous assumption that such a goal is possible. This book explains why it is not. We are all barking up the wrong tree, spending millions of dollars to train and develop executives based on faulty logic.

Classic management theorists, including Howard Koontz, William H. Newman and even Peter Drucker, as well as the latest management gurus like Stephen Covey and Tom Peters, portray managers or executives as if they all have the same style and can be trained to manage the same way – ignoring the fact that different people organize, plan, and control differently. They present good management as a template. They appear to be focusing on what should happen. In reality, there are many styles of management and mismanagement. The permutations of various strengths and weaknesses are endless.

Focusing on what is happening instead of what should be happening leads inevitably to the discovery that people are individuals, with unique sets of strengths and weaknesses in their styles. In this book I offer an alternative approach to managing that is based on what people can have and expect from each other – realistically, in spite of their inherent weaknesses.

One more point on what is different about this book: In recent years there has been a surge in theories about leadership styles, and many books have addressed issues of leadership – but their focus has been mostly on behavioral patterns, from a psychological perspective. I am not a psychologist. My orientation is purely managerial. I am interested in how different people decide differently, communicate differently, staff and motivate differently – and how I can help them perform better for the organization. Thus, this book is not based on theoretical frameworks from psychology, or interviews, or analyses of controlled experiments. Instead, the material discussed here derives from my more than thirty years of clinical (consulting) work in the field, working with organizations in 48 countries that ranged in size from fifteen employees to one hundred thousand employees.