During their first six months to a year in a new job, GMs usually spend considerable time establishing their agendas. Later, they continue to update them but in a less time-consuming process.

Effective executives develop agendas that are made up of loosely connected goals and plans that address their long-, medium-, and short-term responsibilities. The agendas usually address a broad range of financial product/market and organizational issues. They include both vague and specific items. Although most corporations today have formal planning processes that produce written plans, GM’s agendas always include goals, priorities, strategies and plans that are not in these documents. This is not to say that formal plans and the GM’s agendas are incompatible. Generally they are very consistent but they differ in at least three important ways:

1. the formal plans tend to be written mostly in terms of detailed financial numbers. GMs’ agendas tend to be less detailed in financial objectives and more detailed in strategies and plans for the business or the organization
2. formal plans usually focus entirely on the short and moderate run (3 months to 5 years), while GMs’ agendas tend to focus on a broader time frame, which includes the immediate future (1 to 30 days) and the longer run (5 to 20 years)
3. the formal plans tend to be more explicit, rigorous and logical, especially regarding our various financial items fit together. GMs’ agendas often contain lists of goals or plans that are not as explicitly connected.

Executives begin the process of developing these agendas immediately after starting their jobs, if not before. They use their knowledge of the businesses and organizations involved along with new information received each day to quickly develop a rough agenda—typically, this contains a very loosely connected and incomplete set of objectives, along with a few specific strategies and plans. Then over time, as more and more informa­tion is gathered, they incrementally (one step at a time) make the agendas more complete and more tightly connected.

In gathering information to set their agendas, effective GMs rely more on discussions with others than on books, magazines, or reports. These people tend to be individuals with whom they have relationships, not necessarily people in the "appropriate" job or function (e.g., such as a person in the planning function). In this way, they obtain information continuously, day after day, not just at planning meetings. And they do so by using their current knowledge of the business and organization and of management in general to help them direct their questioning, not by asking broad or general questions. In other words, they find ways within the flow of their workdays to ask a few critical questions and to receive in return some information that would be useful for agenda-setting purposes.

With this information, GMs make agenda-setting decisions both consciously (or analytically) and unconsciously (or intuitively) in a process that is largely internal to their minds. Indeed, important agenda-setting decisions are often not observable. In selecting specific activities to include in their agendas, GMs look for those that accomplish multiple goals, that are consistent with all other goals and plans, and that are within their power to implement. Projects and programs that seem important and logical but do not meet these criteria tend to be discarded or are at least resisted.

Almost all effective GMs seem to use this type of agenda-setting process, but the best performers do so to a greater degree and with more skill. For example, the "excellent" per-formers I have studied develop agendas based on more explicit business strategies that address longer time frames and that include a wider range of business issues. They do so by more aggressively seeking information from others (including "bad news"), by more skillfully asking questions, and by more success-fully seeking out programs and projects that can help accomplish multiple objectives at once.