Abstract

This article focuses on the requirements and qualities of general managers of business enterprises. New trends in the workload, problems, decision process, and information environment of corporate general managers are emerging. They suggest that tomorrow's corporation increasingly will need concurrent skills of the leader, administrator, planner, and entrepreneur in general management potions. A useful way to describe a general management activity is by a set of task configurations or roles. Those roles which encompass guiding, organizing, and controlling the work are management roles, and their totality in the firm comprises the management. General management has a twofold concern with these roles, it designs new roles, changes existing ones, and establishes incentives to make them attractive to competent individuals, and it performs some of those roles which are concerned with the exercise of total profit and loss responsibility. The control and extrapolative planning roles are focused on performance and its measurement rather than on human attitudes and response.