Managers and leaders are two very different types of people. Managers' goals arise out of necessities rather than desires; they excel at defusing conflicts between individuals or departments, placating all sides while ensuring that an organization's day-to-day business gets done. Leaders, on the other hand, adopt personal, active attitudes toward goals. They look for the opportunities and rewards that lie around the corner, inspiring subordinates and firing up the creative process with their own energy. Their relationships with employees and coworkers are intense, and their working environment is often chaotic. In this article, first published in 1977, the author argues that businesses need both managers and leaders to survive and succeed. But in the larger U.S. organizations of that time, a "managerial mystique" seemed to perpetuate the development of managerial personalities-people who rely on, and strive to maintain, orderly work patterns. The managerial power ethic favors collective leadership and seeks to avoid risk. That same managerial mystique can stifle leaders' development-How can an entrepreneurial spirit develop when it is submerged in a conservative environment and denied personal attention? Mentor relationships are crucial to the development of leadership personalities, but in large, bureaucratic organizations, such relationships are not encouraged. Businesses must find ways to train good managers and develop leaders at the same time. Without a solid organizational framework, even leaders with the most brilliant ideas may spin their wheels, frustrating coworkers and accomplishing little. But without the entrepreneurial culture that develops when a leader is at the helm of an organization, a business will stagnate and rapidly lose competitive power.

Executives are busy people. They have too much to do and certainly too much to read. Yet, judging from the books and magazines they buy, executives are never too time pressed or information saturated to learn more about leadership. In this roundtable, six experts from the corporate world, the nonprofit sector, and academia tackle tough questions about leadership. The discussion, which began with what leaders ought to do, touched on three common themes: the need to formulate and communicate a vision for an organization; the need for a leader to add value to an enterprise; and an organizational imperative for a leader to motivate followers. Conversation then turned to how leaders ought to lead, focusing on topics such as the leadership role of the generalist in organizations and the need to remain calm and decisive in a crisis. Reflecting their widely varying backgrounds, the participants drew on their experiences to help them drive home their views on developing new leaders, rewarding extraordinary effort, and keeping organizations focused on their missions.

In this HBR Classic, originally published in January-February 1989, Abraham Zaleznik, a psychoanalyst and the Konosuke Matsushita Professor of Leadership, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, observes that many senior executives are substituting the rituals of "psychopolitics"--the balancing of social expectations in the workplace--for the real work of thinking about and acting on ideas relating to products, markets, and customers. In his retrospective commentary, Zaleznik writes that senior executives seem to have established a healthier balance in the 1990s between their real work and psychopolitics. Executives are now leading their companies to deal with external, competitive conditions that require them to cut costs, create products, please customers, and develop markets. What worries Zaleznik today, however, is that under the guise of employee empowerment, senior executives are beginning again to indulge in ritualized actions. For instance, they establish task forces to seek answers to questions they themselves should be addressing. The real work of the executive, says Zaleznik, should always include the thinking that informs and directs action. Zaleznik consults to business and government, and his most recent book, Learning Leadership, was published in 1993. In addition to "Real Work," he has authored five previous HBR articles.

Organizations are political structures which provide platforms for the expression of individual interests, and which revolve around the accumulation of power as a vehicle for transforming personal interests into activities. A "political pyramid" exists when people compete for power in an economy of scarcity. The organizational structure is an instrument rather than an end. It represents the working coalition attached to a CEO, and is a product of negotiation and compromise among executives who hold semiautonomous power bases. McKinsey Award Winner.