The king is dead!

The king is dead, long live the king!

This famous expression supposedly originates from the French "Le roi est mort, vive le roi!", which was first declared upon the accession to the French throne of Charles VII after the death of his father Charles VI in 1422.

In France, the declaration was traditionally made as soon as the coffin containing the remains of the previous king descended into the vault of Saint Denis Basilica. The phrase arose from the law of le mort saisit le vif - that the transfer of sovereignty occurs instantaneously upon the moment of death of the previous monarch (adapted from Wikipedia).

When a new king is celebrated and crowned immediately after the old one dies, this not only illustrates the notion that everything new, sooner or later will develop in to the old. More fundamentally the story supports the principle that someone has to be, and always will be, in charge (i.e. -dear peasants of the general population, don’t bother to orchestrate an uprising. A new king will appear and will act roughly the same as the old).

If there’s no king, there will be a president, a prime minister or more complicated power structures of democracy, such as parliaments and congressmen. Because, someone is (arguably-) accountable for the affairs of the country. That’s the whole point. Accountability and decision-making.

This is also true in corporations. All companies, public as well as privately held, need someone in charge at the very top of the hierarchy. Having a leadership team might not even be a choice, most jurisdictions around the world require people with (personal-) accountability for the affairs of the company. In addition to top management, as companies grow larger, they will also need someone in charge of different sub functions due to practical reasons such as the division of labor and time.

However, once you start compartmentalizing vital functions of an enterprise according to e.g. business areas, geographies, technologies etc. you will inevitably also start your journey towards the creation of hierarchies and organizational borders. At worst, you will nurture fertile ground for managers, that more often than not, strive to increase the relative importance of their own fiefdoms and, sooner rather than later, loose vision of what the company at large is striving to accomplish.

Along comes the General Manager

Popularized by great industrial age companies such as General Electric, and taught through decades by ivory tower institutions such as Harvard Business School. The concept of the General Manager has become common in most large companies. The General Manager should be a person with broad experience, high intelligence and with a general aptitude to not only managing people well, but also an innate ability to traverse across many disciplines. The General Manager should understand the optimal balance between all functions within the company at the same time as he or she should be able to manage all aspects of technology and financing. The General Management concept is however in no way super-human, instead the trick is to become an expert of nothing yet understand everything.

General Manager's fit particularly well in companies of the industrial era where organizations often strived for vertical and/or horizontal integration of products and processes. The General manager should understand the core concepts of the production process as well as how to optimize financial performance while all the time keeping a look out after destructive forces of mismanagement in his or her organization. At least this is what they have been taught at the prestigious MBA program they attended. It’s even in the name, Master of Business Administration. You should be the administrator of the business at large.

Fast forward to the present day, where most business school graduates will end up in what is most often described as the “knowledge economy”. When your product mainly consists of ideas and abstract concepts put together by huge networks of people working together around the world. You also quickly realize that the competencies usually attributed to a General Manager, such as mastering working capital in a manufacturing facility could become outdated, or worse, already is. It is a very different matter to produce bespoke software or, an idea in a PowerPoint presentation (yes, for some people that is actually the only product) compared to producing millions of the same piece of machinery in a large industrial setting.

While the manufacturing facility required a manager with a broad skill set and knowledge about the intricacies of everything from supply chain to steel quality. The manager in the knowledge economy is expected to have deep subject matter expertise.

This is at least what seems to be the mantra and consensus of contemporary articles and scholars on the topic of management. Manifestations of subject matter experts running companies can be seen everywhere from the startup community where the CEO is expected to also have coded the software for the first product, to the larger company where senior middle management is expected to be ever more hands-on for fixing technical problems or “making the sell”.

The General Connector!

As a part of my Eisenhower Fellowship I today had a fantastic discussion with Brad Bernthal, professor at The University of Colorado Boulder. Brad works with a broad spectrum of ideas within topics of law, regulation, management and entrepreneurship. We specifically dove in to topics of entrepreneurship and leadership related to governance of modern day knowledge based companies. Particularly intriguing was our discussion on the evolution (or death-) of the General Manager.

Our angle of attack was perhaps a bit different than what could be expected. We started off our trail of thought in theories of “super connectors” and informal networks within companies. Repeated studies and articles (e.g. Teigland 1998, Anklam 2009) have described how certain people within organizations are the go-to-person when problems need to get solved or innovations need to be discussed. In my view, these super connected people share some very interesting characteristics such as a will to share knowledge, a humility to accept that they don’t know everything, a curiosity to learn and maybe most important of all, an intuitive skill to “connect the dots”. The latter also referred to as Cognitive Proximity or Lateral Thinking.

If being a super connector with high levels of cognitive proximity are core management skills in the networked society. Does this mean that the fate of the General Manager is sealed? Simply put, is Harvard Business School et al. training our managers in the wrong way? Are they churning out hoards of clueless MBA’s in to a world where their management skills are already dated even before they get a chance to prove them?

I hope not. And, for the record, I do actually trust academia… Instead, maybe it's simply a matter of semantics and changing our vocabulary when explaining to companies and senior executives what the General Manager of the future should look like?

I understand if readers of this article at this point in time want to tell me that what I am writing about is not new. Companies are changing and the point of the article is over due? Concepts of the networked workplace, globalization and the changing role of the manager have been around for over a decade!

Yes. But...

I would argue that the fundamental shift required within companies in order to foster a new kind of general manager is neither well understood as a management principle or as a career path. Being a super connector is not quantified and not celebrated.

Just consider your very own experience. You probably know the type of person I am talking about. Very often this will be a person who, in seemingly magical ways, gets stuff done that nobody else would have managed to accomplish by working through established hierarchies and processes. In some other magical way the same person usually also knows who you should talk to in order to fix your problem and is happy to introduce you and then get out of the way… Is this person usually celebrated by top management, put on advanced career programs or even mentioned in the internal article describing a specific project’s success? Nope. Not in my experience at least.

So, coming back to my discussion with Brad. We finished off our meeting by planting the thought that perhaps, what is needed is new mental model, a new explanations framework that can describe to senior executives what should be expected of a manager in order to both attract new generations of talent as well as become successful in a networked world with lots of weak ties. In a world where trust and reciprocity within a large network of actors is the most valuable currency, the super connector and his team, will be the clear winners.

Similar to how the concept of General Management once became both a job title and a career path. Could we do the same to the new breed of managers?

My proposal is therefore, starting with the pure issue of semantics, that we start calling the discipline something else than General Managers, perhaps a better word is "General Connectors” (as a synthesis of General Management and connectivity). Simply proposing a new definition could seem futile. But, mental models have strong relations to established words and expressions…

General Connector is perhaps not the best expression that I have ever made up, and might never catch on, but this is what first came to mind (if you have better ideas I would be happy to accept any proposals in the comment field below).

The King

Remember the story about the dead king and his successor at the very beginning of this article? Similar to a country, for all the reasons discussed above, companies will always need to be managed in some way or other. Old management styles and value systems will never completely die out. But, new management styles have to emerge, new business books will have to be written and new theories have to be taught. Yet, it will still always be management.

Hence, I finish off by proclaiming: The General Manager is Dead, long live the General Connector…