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.