Focus on the General Manager: The Harvard Business School

The Harvard Business school launched a new program called the GMP, whose focus appears to be training its participants to be a “jack of all trades, a master of none”. In effect, they want everyone in the program to think in more “general terms” about ways to approach to the problems they face at their companies.

The program targets executives with 15 to 20 years of experience and includes professionals from 25 to 30 different countries, 50 different industries, and includes all functional areas. Each participant is either a leader or about to become one within their company.

“When you’re responsible for leading, it’s not enough to do what you’ve done in the past. You need to fundamentally rethink what you’re doing and where you want to go in the future.” - Harvard Business School -

“I’ve emphasized that we teach people a set of skills, perspectives, and ideas. But what we’re trying to do is get them ready to learn and relearn, and in some cases unlearn, and to critically think about how they look at the world and some assumptions they make.” - Benjamin Esty is the Roy and Elizabeth Simmons Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Program participants are taught problem solving by being given problems faced by today’s companies. Each participant gets their own problem to solve and are expected to confer with fellow participants before coming up with a solution. The goal of the program is to help participants solve problems by seeing the problem as a whole, taking in to account all of the linkages and interconnections within their organization. It also trains participants to manage issues through other people, rather than trying to resolve the problem by themselves.

Read more about the program at the Harvard business school 

“Early career success often comes through specialization in a single functional domain, but further advancement frequently requires the development of a more general set of skills and a more comprehensive, multi-functional perspective. In short, future success requires an ability to think, act, and lead differently. The goal of Harvard Business School’s General Management Program (GMP) is to smooth and accelerate this transition into general management.”