This Business Week article caught my eye over a year ago, and lingered in the back of my mind.
Punch line: The best leadership is good management. Too many so-called leaders fancy themselves above the messy, but crucial, work of managing. So they don’t know what’s going on.
The article’s poster boy for good management is, you guessed it … Barack Obama.
Oops.
Corporate America has had too much of fancy leadership disconnected from plain old management.
How did this happen? It became fashionable some years ago to separate “leaders” from “managers” — you know, distinguishing those who “do the right things” from those who “do things right.”
I hear stories about this every day: about CEOs who don’t manage so much as deem — pronouncing performance targets, for instance, that are supposed to be met by whoever is doing the real managing.
The truth is, many of the most successful strategies are not conceived in isolation at the “top.”
Unfortunately, detached leaders tend to be more concerned with impressing outsiders than managing within.
The most striking example of engaged leadership now comes — not from the business world — but from the political realm.
Most impressive about President Barack Obama’s energetically led campaign was how capably he managed it.
(Remember all those photos of Obama on his BlackBerry?
BusinessWeek, Overled and Undermanaged, August 6, 2009
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_33/b4143068890733.htm
As I often say, the only thing that lets me sleep well at night is knowing that the Administration will bungle the implementation of any wacky programs the Congress legislates …
The Homa Files 
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