The Manager's Job

If you ask a manager what he does, he will most likely tell you that he plans, organizes, co-ordinates, and controls. The fact is that these four words, which have dominated management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in 1916, tell us little about what managers actually do. At best, they indicate some vague objectives managers have when they work. My intention in this article is simple: to break the reader away from Fayol's words and introduce him to a more supportable, and what I believe to be a more useful, description of managerial work. This description derives from my review and synthesis of the available research on how various managers have spent their time in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain.