The General Managers by John Kotter of the Harvard Business School set out to answer this very question of “professional managers” who can step into any business and run it well. Kotter took an empathetic approach of walking in the footsteps of 15 general managers across a variety of industries over a year. His key finding was successful managers are domain specialists having spent most or all of their career in one industry. This enabled them to establish cooperative working relationships and wide informal networks that he attributes to their success. In what should give pause to all of us, he finds outsiders rarely do as well—as probably John Sculley and others found at Apple.

This book, written in 1982, is now more of a historical book marking a point in the evolution of managerial science rather than a practical guide. The original, mostly qualitative research that makes up the book was taken during 1976 to 1981, so realistically this is a 70's picture of the art of general management. Historically, the book was written as corporations were in the large, competitive operating companies mode within large consolidating umbrella corporations to single unified businesses; during a period of nascent initial acceptance and declining skepticism of using information technology; and an increase in economic growth post the gas crunch and recession of the 70's in America. The book profiles 9 GM's at large companies with profit-center responsibility. This might understate it: these were not middle managers--they were one level below the CEO, they were divisional presidents managing hundreds or thousands of staff.

Topics covered include types of stress and difficulties in the job; different org charts; the kinds of personalities that one finds in this kind of role; and finally different approaches to setting and communicating strategies to their staff. One of the more interesting inserts in the book is a minute by minute day-in-the-life of a divisional GM, which reads almost like reality TV--and without spoiling it makes one wonder how these folks ever get anything done. Overall, this is an interesting read into what businesses were like and management science was like in 1979 or so, almost quaint in some ways, with potentially a few timeless truths about management. ( )