Management is (Still) Not Leadership...

...says John Kotter in his HBR blog post from today. He writes that he was a few weeks ago once again reminded about the massive confusion around the two terms leadership and management.

He states that the mistakes people make around this issue are threefolded; people use the terms "management" and "leadership" interchangeably, people use the term "leadership" to refer to the people at the very top of hierarchies and people often think of "leadership" in terms of personality characteristics.

He explains the difference:
"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.
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."

Interesting. Always good with a reminder. Read the full article here.

I found a link to another blog post of him from 2011 called "Hierarchy and Network: Two structures, one organization".
In this blog post he explains his believe that "the successful organization of the future will have two organizational structures: a Hierarchy, and a more teaming, egalitarian, and adaptive Network. Both are designed and purposive. While the Hierarchy is as important as it has always been for optimizing work, the Network is where big change happens. It allows a company to more easily spot big opportunities and then change itself to grab them."

 Interesting. I recognize this from somewhere...

Finally, John Kotter via YouTube, explains the difference between Change Management vs. Change Leadership:

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