Decades after Marvin Bower, the legendary father of modern management consulting and former managing director of McKinsey & Company, penned The Will to Manage: Corporate Success Through Programmed Management, his insights remain a bedrock for lasting corporate success.
In an age of rapid technological change and market volatility, Bower’s core message—that effective management is not an accident, but a conscious, willed, and systematic discipline—is more critical than ever.
The “will to manage” is the active, resolute determination of a business’s top executives to establish and adhere to a sound, integrated management system. It moves management from a reactive state of “firefighting” to a proactive system of “programmed management.”
1. The Power of Company Philosophy: ‘The Way We Do Things Around Here’
For Bower, the single greatest competitive advantage is a clearly defined and universally understood company philosophy. This philosophy is a set of basic beliefs and guiding principles that dictates the expected pattern of behavior for everyone in the organization. It answers the fundamental question: How do we operate?
The most successful companies, according to Bower’s observation, build their philosophy around five non-negotiable beliefs:
- High Ethical Standards: Maintaining impeccable integrity in all external and internal dealings is the essential starting point. This foundation of principle attracts high-caliber people and gives employees the confidence to act decisively, knowing they are doing the right thing.
- The Fact-Founded, Thought-Through Approach: Decisions must be based on objective facts, not intuition, personality, or internal politics. This culture of factual analysis promotes better, more adaptable decisions and fosters higher morale.
- Constant Environmental Adjustment: A business must continuously adjust its strategy and operations to the forces at work in its competitive environment. In a volatile market, this principle demands constant learning and self-correction.
- Performance-Based Judgement: People must be judged and rewarded solely on their performance and contribution to the business’s goals, not on their personal traits, background, or social skills. This ensures the best talent rises to the top.
- A Sense of Competitive Urgency: Management must adopt and administer all systems with a relentless drive to compete, focusing on seizing opportunities, addressing problems immediately, and building market share for the long term.
2. The Mandate to Organize: Clarity Over Muddle
A central component of the Will to Manage is the will to organize. Organizational “muddles”—where roles, responsibilities, and authority are undefined—waste national resources and cripple corporate effectiveness.
Bower argues that organizing is a fundamental planning process that must bring clarity to the internal workings of the business:
- Define Duties and Responsibilities: Organizational planning must first determine the activities to be performed, group these activities into positions (duties), and then assign them to individuals (responsibilities).
- Authority Must Equal Responsibility: A critical, non-negotiable guideline is that responsibility and authority must go hand-in-hand. If an individual is responsible for a task, they must possess the commensurate authority to carry it out. This principle is a powerful instrument for effective management, eliminating the “square peg in a round hole” problem where capable people fail due to poor organizational design.
- A Planned Harness is Better Than a Tangled One: While organizational structure is, by nature, restrictive, a soundly developed plan is a “harness” that guides people’s efforts toward common objectives. This planned restriction ensures people “pull together” rather than work at cross-purposes.
3. Management as a Professional Discipline
Bower viewed management not as a personality contest or an art form, but as a true profession—one that demands the same high standards, ethical rigor, and systematic application of knowledge as law or medicine.
For today’s executive, embracing the Will to Manage means making a conscious commitment to:
- Systematize Management: Stop relying on individual heroics and start building robust, repeatable systems (programmed management) for planning, organizing, developing people, and controlling the enterprise.
- Act as a Value-Based Compass: The executive’s role is to embody and continually reinforce the company’s philosophy. Values are not mere posters; they are the decisions and actions executives take every day.
- Invest in High-Caliber People: The greatest asset is people. The will to manage is intrinsically linked to the will to find, train, and challenge intelligent, high-integrity individuals who can function as leaders within a network, rather than mere subordinates within a command structure.
In an economy defined by speed, complexity, and noise, Marvin Bower’s message offers a powerful antidote: the enduring competitive edge belongs to the leaders who have the will to manage their business with clarity, integrity, and disciplined intention.