What Leaders Really Do
Kotter's short HBR piece making a clean distinction between management (coping with complexity: planning, organising, controlling) and leadership (coping with change: setting direction, aligning people, motivating).
The distinction has been widely copied since but rarely improved on.
For product direction it is a useful self-audit — most roles require both, and most practitioners default to one and starve the other, usually without noticing.
Short, canonical; pair with Kotter's Accelerate for the contemporary expansion. A piece worth rereading before a major organisational change.
Central argument
Kotter argues that management and leadership are distinct but complementary functions that organizations consistently conflate. Management addresses complexity through planning, organizing, and controlling — producing order and predictability. Leadership addresses change through setting direction, aligning people, and motivating — producing movement. His central claim is that most organizations are overmanaged and underled, and that this imbalance becomes acutely dangerous as the pace of change accelerates.
Critique
The binary is analytically clean but empirically fragile: Kotter treats the two functions as separable in practice, yet in most real organizations — especially smaller or faster-moving ones — the same person must perform both, often simultaneously and in ways that actively interfere with each other. The framework offers no guidance on how to switch modes, manage the tension, or recognize when one is crowding out the other, which is precisely where the difficulty lies. It also reflects a 1990 organizational context of large, hierarchical firms, leaving open the question of how the distinction holds in flat, autonomous, or distributed product organizations where 'aligning people' and 'planning' may be indistinguishable.
Why it matters for product
For a CPO, the management–leadership distinction maps directly onto a recurring structural failure: product leaders who spend their cycles on roadmap governance, sprint reviews, and metric dashboards — classic management work — while neglecting the leadership functions of articulating where the product is going and why anyone should change how they work to get there. Kotter's framework is particularly useful as a diagnostic before a major platform shift, a reorganization, or a strategy pivot, where the people-alignment and direction-setting work is non-negotiable but easy to defer in favor of the operational machinery that feels more controllable.