November 8, 2008

Leading, not managing

There are many cat­e­gories of nerd­dom in which I fall, but today I had to share this bit of man­age­ment nerd­dom from an Cring­ley post about Steve Jobs:

Dell and HP have the odd strate­gic ini­tia­tive, like get­ting into or out of media play­ers or TVs, but the idea of a com­pre­hen­sive cor­po­rate strat­egy, well that’s too much to expect from com­pa­nies that are man­aged, not led.

I high­lighted the phrase that intrigues me — the dif­fer­ence between man­ag­ing and lead­ing. How many com­pa­nies are truly led anymore?

When exam­in­ing the news indus­try I’d have to say that almost all of them are being man­aged — “let’s manage the print decline”, “let’s manage the Inter­net growth”, “we’ll have to manage the transition” are prob­a­bly common phrases being uttered by top exec­u­tives today.

The Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Monitor’s deci­sion to end their daily print prod­uct and become a pri­marly dig­i­tal media com­pany smacks of lead­er­ship to me.

Filed under: Business,Journalism,Management

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