Harvard Business Review Online | King of the Mountain

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King of the Mountain

Executives perform many balancing acts, but one of the trickiest is figuring out how much time to spend on the nuts and bolts of the business and how much to devote to the big picture. Each has its dangers, as Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter wrote in a perceptive 1979 article. Too great a focus on the details can render executives powerless, but too little can result in a destructive form of isolation. As powerlessness in lower levels of organizations can manifest itself in overly routinized jobs, so it can at upper levels as well. Routine work drives out nonroutine work. Accomplishment becomes a question of nailing down details. Short-term results provide immediate gratifications and satisfy shareholders or other constituencies with limited interests. People at the top need to insulate themselves from the routine operations of the organization in order to develop and exercise power. But this very insulation can lead to another source of powerlessness lack of information. Leaders who are cut out of an organizations information networks understand neither what is going on at lower levels nor that their own isolation may be having negative effects. All too often top executives declare a new humanitarian policy (e.g., Participatory management is now our style) only to find the policy ignored or mistrusted because it is perceived as coming from uncaring bosses. The temptation for them then is to pull in every shred of power they can and to decrease the power available to other people to act. Innovation loses out in favor of control. Dictatorial statements come down from the top, spreading the mentality of powerlessness until the whole organization becomes sluggish and people concentrate on protecting what they have rather than on producing what they can. When everyone is playing king of the mountain, guarding his or her turf jealously, then king of the mountain becomes the only game in town.

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http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/hbr/hbrsa/current/0303/article... 01-Mar-03