General and operations managers
Also called General manager, GM, Operations manager, Director of operations, VP of operations
In brief
In May 2025, BLS counted 3,503,020 US general and operations managers, with median pay of $105,770 a year. Of the BLS counts since 2021, the highest was 3,584,420, in May 2024, close to the May 2025 count. The earliest figure here is an estimate of 360,000 from 1900, not measured the same way as today's count. The last full technology era for general and operations managers: Cloud workflow platforms, 2015 to 2023.
What the sources say
Official outlook
BLS projects employment to grow 5% from 2025 to 2035.
AI exposure studies
- 38.5% of this job's tasks are exposed to large language models. Not a forecast of job losses. Eloundou and others, 2023
- 0.16 estimated probability that the whole occupation could be computerised, over an unspecified number of years. Not a forecast of job losses. Frey and Osborne, 2013
Since the 2013 prediction
In 2013, Frey and Osborne put this job's probability of computerisation at 0.16. BLS counted 1,973,700 of these jobs in May 2013 and 3,503,020 in May 2025. The count moved sharply in one step, May 2020 to May 2021, when BLS changed how it estimates these counts, so no change is derived here.
Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. BLS publishes these counts as yearly survey snapshots and cautions against reading them as a precise trend. In May 2021 BLS changed how it estimates these counts (a model-based method using three years of survey data) and moved fully to the 2018 occupation codes, so part of a change across 2021 can come from the method rather than the work.
Last updated .
Cite this page
Future History. (2026, October 11). General and operations managers: jobs and pay since 1900 [Data set; data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35]. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1021
Future History. "General and operations managers: jobs and pay since 1900." Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35. Last modified October 11, 2026. https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1021.
@misc{futurehistory_11_1021, author = {{Future History}}, title = {General and operations managers: jobs and pay since 1900}, year = {2026}, month = oct, howpublished = {\url{https://futurehistory.earth/timeline/11-1021}}, note = {Last updated 2026-10-11. Data as of BLS OEWS May 2025; BLS Employment Projections 2025-35}, }
The access date is today's date on your device.
≈ $103,058 in 2024 prices (derived by us, CPI-adjusted)
The Western Railroad of Massachusetts becomes the site of the first fatal railroad operational accident in US history when a freight train and passenger train collide head-on near Westfield on October 5, 1841, killing two men. The incident exposes the impossibility of running a geographically dispersed enterprise through owner-supervision alone. The board's response, appointing Charles Minot as General Superintendent with defined authority and reporting requirements, is the founding act of professional management in the United States. Alfred Chandler later identified this as the moment the modern managerial hierarchy was born.
Daniel McCallum, general superintendent of the Erie Railroad, produces the first modern organizational chart in American business history: a tree diagram showing the hierarchy of authority and reporting relationships across the railroad's divisions. McCallum accompanied the chart with a written set of management principles emphasizing clear lines of authority, regular reporting of detailed operating statistics, accountability for specific results, and promotion based on performance rather than seniority. These principles are recognizable as the foundations of professional management practice 170 years later.
Frederick Winslow Taylor publishes "The Principles of Scientific Management," the most influential management text of the 20th century. Taylor's central argument (that there is one best way to perform any task, discoverable by systematic observation and measurement, and that management's job is to find and enforce it) transformed the factory superintendent's role from foreman-with-authority to professional analyst-and-enforcer. The book was adopted in business schools, government agencies, and military organizations within a decade. Its influence is still legible in Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, and the "data-driven management" discourse of the 2020s.
Alfred P. Sloan implements the multidivisional structure at General Motors, creating what Chandler called 'the most important organizational innovation of the 20th century in American business.' Under Sloan's structure, GM becomes five semi-autonomous divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac), each run by a general manager accountable to a central corporate office that controls capital allocation and strategy. This is the organizational form that made the professional general manager not a railroad curiosity but a permanent feature of large American enterprise. By 1930, most large US corporations had adopted some version of the multidivisional structure.
The American Management Association is founded, consolidating several predecessor organizations into the first national professional association for the management class. The AMA established management as a recognized discipline with a body of knowledge, professional development curriculum, and a publication program, including Management Review (1923), still published today. Within a decade, the AMA had tens of thousands of members and was running management development programs for large corporations. The founding of the AMA is the point at which management became formally recognized as a profession in the United States.
William H. Whyte publishes "The Organization Man," a sociological study of the mid-century American corporate management culture. Whyte documented the conformity, loyalty to the organization over the individual, and suppression of independent judgment that characterized the American corporate middle manager of the 1950s. The book sold over two million copies and entered the cultural lexicon as the definitive portrait of the postwar management class. Its influence was the inverse of Taylor's: where Taylor prescribed systematic control, Whyte described what that control had done to the human beings exercising it. McGregor's Theory Y response (1960) argued the opposite model was both more ethical and more productive.
Henry Mintzberg publishes "The Nature of Managerial Work," based on direct observation of five senior managers over the course of a week. His finding was subversive: managers do not plan, organize, and control in the orderly sequence the textbooks describe. They work in short bursts of activity (half of all activities lasted less than nine minutes), are driven by interruptions and verbal communication rather than systematic reflection, and use informal networks as much as formal reporting lines. Mintzberg identified ten managerial roles organized under three categories (interpersonal, informational, and decisional) that remain the most accurate empirical description of what general managers actually do.
Jack Welch launches a major delayering program at General Electric, removing multiple management layers from the organization in pursuit of speed and accountability. 'Get rid of the middle managers,' Welch told Harvard Business Review, arguing that layers of management slowed decision-making and insulated senior leadership from reality. GE cut its management workforce substantially through the late 1980s and early 1990s, and the 'delayering' concept became the dominant corporate restructuring thesis of the period. The discourse about AI eliminating middle management in the 2010s-2020s is, in important ways, a technological restatement of Welch's organizational argument, and it has failed to materialize at aggregate scale for the same reasons Welch's version did: the work doesn't disappear, it just gets redistributed.
Two frameworks that define the modern management operating system appear in the same year. Robert Kaplan and David Norton publish "The Balanced Scorecard" in Harvard Business Review (January 1992), giving management teams a structured way to translate strategy into four linked measurement domains (financial, customer, internal processes, learning and growth). Michael Hammer and James Champy publish "Reengineering the Corporation" in 1993 (research begun 1992), arguing that most corporate processes were the accidental accumulation of decisions made when the constraints were different, and that radical redesign rather than incremental improvement was the right response. Both frameworks are still in active use thirty years later, now augmented by AI that can actually generate the reports and analyses the frameworks prescribed.
Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes generally available to enterprise customers on November 1, 2023: the first AI tool deployed at enterprise scale that directly targets the coordination and reporting overhead of the general manager's role. Meeting summaries that once required 30 minutes of post-meeting work can be generated in 5 minutes. Status report drafts that once required an hour of data aggregation can be produced in minutes. Vodafone documented 3 hours per employee per week reclaimed across an enterprise deployment. Forrester's TEI found up to 116% ROI. For the first time in the 180-year history of professional management, a significant fraction of the work that defines the role in any given week is being done by software rather than by the person holding the title.
Will AI replace general and operations managers? What the research says
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than an average.
Each figure is stated by the named source; we publish no forecasts of our own. Where sources disagree, the spread is the honest signal.
What's changing day to day for general and operations managers
Three parts of your work where AI is already doing real lifting, and what stays yours.
AI is sitting alongside you hereRun a leaner meeting operating cadence using Microsoft 365 Copilot, reviewing AI-generated pre-meeting briefings assembled from Teams threads and email history, using Copilot-generated real-time transcripts and action-item lists during calls, and dispatching AI-drafted follow-up summaries to stakeholders within minutes of meeting end rather than hours.
Run a leaner meeting operating cadence using Microsoft 365 Copilot, reviewing AI-generated pre-meeting briefings assembled from Teams threads and email history, using Copilot-generated real-time transcripts and action-item lists during calls, and dispatching AI-drafted follow-up summaries to stakeholders within minutes of meeting end rather than hours.[8],[12],[2]
AI handles the logistics of meeting intelligence: recaps, action items, follow-ups. Your leverage is in the decisions those meetings generate: which priorities to realign, which conflicts to resolve, which stakeholders to bring in. Focus meeting time on the judgment calls AI flags but cannot make. Own the "so what" layer and delegate the documentation to Copilot.
AI is sitting alongside you hereGovern the department's agentic back-office workflow layer using Agentforce Operations, configuring AI agents for purchase-order routing, vendor onboarding, compliance-document verification, and approval-chain orchestration
Govern the department's agentic back-office workflow layer using Agentforce Operations, configuring AI agents for purchase-order routing, vendor onboarding, compliance-document verification, and approval-chain orchestration; setting exception-handling rules for cases requiring human judgment; and monitoring agent audit trails to ensure process integrity and accountability.[13],[6],[2]
Invest in understanding which back-office processes are agent-ready (structured, rule-based, high-volume) versus which require judgment. Design the exception-handling framework yourself: that's where your organizational knowledge is irreplaceable.
AI is sitting alongside you hereManage team and project portfolio status through AI-generated smart summaries in Asana, configuring Asana AI Teammates to handle routine task routing and status update collection, reviewing AI-synthesized portfolio health reports that flag blockers and milestone slippage, and concentrating human attention on the cross-team conflicts and priority trade-offs that automation cannot resolve.
Manage team and project portfolio status through AI-generated smart summaries in Asana, configuring Asana AI Teammates to handle routine task routing and status update collection, reviewing AI-synthesized portfolio health reports that flag blockers and milestone slippage, and concentrating human attention on the cross-team conflicts and priority trade-offs that automation cannot resolve.[14],[4],[2]
AI status management eliminates the coordination tax: the hours spent chasing updates, aggregating status emails, and writing progress summaries. Reinvest that time in the organizational interventions that move projects: unblocking teams stuck on political or resource conflicts, resetting scope when reality has drifted from the plan, and coaching team leads on the judgment calls AI surfaces but cannot make.
Where general and operations managers go next
Natural next steps for someone with your foundation: not exits, evolutions.
- Financial Managers
- US median pay
- $166,570 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +9.7%
- Project Management Specialists
- US median pay
- $102,320 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +6.7%
- Management Analysts
- US median pay
- $101,860 (May 2025)
- BLS outlook 2025-35
- +10.1%
What each move takes
Financial Managers
General and Operations Managers who own P&L and budget accountability already perform much of the work that defines a Financial Manager: financial performance review, budget planning, investment prioritization, and reporting to the CFO. The pivot is natural for GMs who want to specialize in the financial dimension of operations rather than the full general-management portfolio. The primary skill gap is depth in financial modeling, accounting standards (GAAP/IFRS), treasury, and the regulatory compliance knowledge that CFO-track roles require. AI is increasing demand for Financial Managers who can interpret model outputs and communicate financial strategy: the human judgment and communication skills a GM brings are directly transferable.
How has the work of general and operations managers changed since 1841?
The tools that defined the work, one line per era. Select an era to see how it reshaped the work.
Telegraph + operational timetables + the organizational chart
The railroad general superintendent ran the first truly distributed American enterprise through three instruments: the telegraph (for real-time communication across hundreds of miles), operational timetables (standardized rules for train movements that could be followed without direct supervision), and the organizational chart (a formal hierarchy of accountability invented specifically to run railroads). Before the telegraph, management meant physical presence; the superintendent had to walk the property to know what was happening. The telegraph made coordination at distance possible for the first time, and created the first class of professional managers whose authority was transmitted by wire rather than in person. Alfred D. Chandler documented this as the founding moment of the managerial revolution in American capitalism.
Scientific management: time-and-motion studies, standard operating procedures
Frederick Winslow Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911) transformed the factory superintendent's job from supervision-by-experience to management-by-measurement. Taylor's core claim was that there was one best way to perform any task, discoverable by systematic observation and timing, and that management's job was to find it, codify it into standard procedures, and enforce it. The Gilbreths added motion study. Henry Gantt added the Gantt chart (1910) for project scheduling. Frank and Lillian Gilbreth filmed worker motions and analyzed them frame by frame. The American Management Association was founded in 1923 to professionalize and disseminate the new science. For the working manager, this era meant replacing intuition with paperwork: time-study sheets, production standards, exception reports, and the first management reporting systems that were not just financial ledgers.
Telephone + carbon-copy memos + the corporate filing system
The 1930s-1950s corporate manager ran the organization through three paper technologies: the telephone (real-time communication within and across buildings), the carbon-copy memo (a written record of every instruction, distributed simultaneously to multiple recipients), and the filing cabinet (an organizational memory that could be retrieved by anyone with access, not just the manager who made the original decision). These tools created the layer of administrative support (secretaries, stenographers, filing clerks) that defined the mid-century corporate office. McGregor's Theory X/Y (1960) was an argument about whether the people doing the work under this apparatus were shirkers who needed tight control or capable adults who needed autonomy; the apparatus itself was not in question. Mintzberg's 1973 'The Nature of Managerial Work' documented what managers actually did in this era: short bursts of activity, constant interruptions, a preference for verbal over written communication, a pattern that has not materially changed since.
Mainframe MIS + management information systems + the IBM System/360
IBM's System/360 family (announced April 7, 1964; shipped 1965) and the management information systems movement of the 1960s-70s brought computing to business management for the first time. Large corporations could now run payroll, inventory, and production reporting on their own hardware rather than through punch-card bureau services. The management information system promised what scientific management had attempted with paper: a real-time view of the organization's vital signs, delivered to the manager's desk without walking the floor. In practice, MIS reports were typically batch-processed, available only to top management, and required a dedicated IT department to produce. The manager's relationship to data in this era was consumption, not manipulation: you received the report the IT department had decided to run, on the schedule they had decided to run it. The personal computer would change that.
Spreadsheet era: VisiCalc (1979), Lotus 1-2-3 (1983), Excel (1985)
VisiCalc, introduced by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston in October 1979 for the Apple II, gave the manager something no previous tool had offered: personal analytical power. For the first time, a department manager could build their own budget model, run their own scenario analysis, and produce their own financial reports without going through an IT department or an accountant. Lotus 1-2-3 (January 1983) made the IBM PC the dominant business computer; Microsoft Excel (August 1985, initially Macintosh) completed the transition. The spreadsheet did not replace management jobs: it expanded what a manager could do alone. It also created a new competency requirement: managers who could not build a spreadsheet model were disadvantaged relative to those who could. The 'spreadsheet jockey' became a valued management archetype in the 1980s and 1990s.
Effect on the workSpreadsheets eliminated most of the typing-pool and clerical-calculation support infrastructure that had served the management layer, while creating a significant increase in the analytical work managers were expected to do directly. The number of management positions continued to grow; the administrative support apparatus shrank.
ERP systems: SAP R/3 (1992), Oracle ERP (1990s), the balanced scorecard (1992)
SAP R/3, released in 1992, put enterprise resource planning software on client-server architecture for the first time: within a decade, it was running the back-office operations of most of the Fortune 500. ERP gave the operations manager a unified view of financials, inventory, purchasing, HR, and production in a single system, replacing the fragmented patchwork of departmental systems that had accumulated since the mainframe era. In the same year, Robert Kaplan and David Norton published 'The Balanced Scorecard' in Harvard Business Review (January 1992), giving the management class a framework for translating strategy into four linked measurement domains. The combination of ERP data and scorecard structure defined the management operating system of the 1990s and early 2000s: a regular management review of a handful of KPIs, drawn from the ERP, against the strategic targets set in the annual planning cycle.
Email + SaaS dashboards + Six Sigma: Tableau (2003), Looker (2011)
By 2000, email had displaced the carbon-copy memo entirely and was well on its way to displacing the telephone for most internal coordination. The management job had acquired a new structural feature: the inbox. Tableau Software (founded 2003) pioneered self-service business intelligence with a drag-and-drop interface that let operations managers build their own dashboards without IT; Looker (2011) brought SQL-based analytics to the browser. Six Sigma, originally developed at Motorola (1986) and evangelized at scale by Jack Welch at GE through the mid-1990s, matured into the standard quality-management framework of the 2000s: a manager without Six Sigma certification was increasingly disadvantaged in manufacturing and process-intensive services. The net effect: the analytical sophistication expected of an operations manager rose substantially, but the tools to meet that expectation arrived almost simultaneously.
Cloud workflow platforms: Slack (2013), Asana (2012), Zoom (2013), OKRs at scale
Slack (launched publicly August 2013) redefined team coordination from email threads to persistent group channels, flattening the hierarchy of information access and creating a new management challenge: the always-on notification stream. Asana (2012) gave operations managers a portfolio view of team work in a single system. Zoom (2013) eventually completed the shift away from conference calls to video. John Doerr's 'Measure What Matters' (2018) popularized OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the goal-setting system originally developed at Intel and deployed at Google, across the broader management class. By 2020, the operations manager's tool stack had expanded from the 1990s ERP-and-email pair to a full suite of SaaS coordination layers: each producing notifications, reports, and status updates that consumed increasing time. The coordination overhead of modern management was well-documented before AI arrived to reduce it.
AI management layer: Microsoft 365 Copilot (2023), Asana AI (2025), Tableau Pulse (2024), Agentforce Operations (2026)
Microsoft 365 Copilot (general availability November 1, 2023) was the first AI tool deployed at enterprise scale that directly targeted the operations manager's core coordination overhead: meeting summaries, status report generation, email synthesis, and document drafting. Forrester's Total Economic Impact study (2024) found Copilot cuts meeting recap time per meeting and saves Vodafone employees a few hours per week. Tableau Pulse (2024) delivers proactive AI-generated KPI anomaly alerts directly to Slack and Teams without requiring the manager to log into a dashboard. Asana AI Smart Status (2025) auto-generates weekly stakeholder updates from task data. Salesforce Agentforce Operations (GA April 2026) deploys AI agents that autonomously handle vendor onboarding, purchase-order routing, and back-office compliance workflows, cutting cycle times 50-70% and eliminating 80% of manual data entry. The administrative defense of the operations manager role has materially collapsed: the coordination and reporting work that once consumed a sizeable share of a manager's week is increasingly automated. What remains is the accountability and judgment layer, which AI cannot bear. Employment continues to grow.
Effect on the workBLS projects +6% net employment growth 2023-2033 despite the automation of the administrative task layer, consistent with the thesis that AI is augmenting the role's strategic scope rather than contracting total employment. The Microsoft Work Trend Index 2024 found that managers using Copilot report being asked to do MORE strategic work as a result of reclaimed time.
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In other countries
The latest figure each country's statistics agency publishes for this job. Each uses its own occupation definition, survey basis and currency, so the numbers are not directly comparable with each other or with the US figures.
Australia (ANZSCO 1112)
- Employment, 2025
- 68,700, ABS Labour Force Survey Official statistic Report an errorABS Labour Force Survey (Detailed), table EQ08: employed persons in ANZSCO 1112 General Managers, national (summed across sex and state/territory), annual average of 4 quarterly estimates.
View all 28 years of cited US data, each linked to its source
| Year | US employment | Annual pay (median unless marked) | Source | Report |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1900 | 360,000 | n/a | Est., Chandler (1977), The Visible Hand Researched context | Report |
| 1930 | 800,000 | n/a | Est., Chandler (1977), The Visible Hand Researched context | Report |
| 1960 | 1,750,000 | $7,500 | Est., Derived estimate (employment) Researched contextEst., Census Bureau (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 1980 | 2,750,000 | $27,000 | Decennial Census (employment) Researched contextEst., BLS Historical Statistics (pay) Researched context | Report |
| 2000 | 2,221,590 | $61,160 | BLS OEWS 2000 Official statistic | Report |
| 2003 | 1,892,060 | $72,800 | BLS OEWS May 2003 Official statistic | Report |
| 2004 | 1,752,910 | $77,420 | BLS OEWS May 2004 Official statistic | Report |
| 2005 | 1,663,810 | $81,480 | BLS OEWS May 2005 Official statistic | Report |
| 2006 | 1,663,280 | $85,230 | BLS OEWS May 2006 Official statistic | Report |
| 2007 | 1,655,410 | $88,700 | BLS OEWS May 2007 Official statistic | Report |
| 2008 | 1,697,690 | $91,570 | BLS OEWS May 2008 Official statistic | Report |
| 2009 | 1,689,680 | $92,650 | BLS OEWS May 2009 Official statistic | Report |
| 2010 | 1,708,080 | $94,400 | BLS OEWS May 2010 Official statistic | Report |
| 2011 | 1,805,030 | $95,150 | BLS OEWS May 2011 Official statistic | Report |
| 2012 | 1,899,460 | $95,440 | BLS OEWS May 2012 Official statistic | Report |
| 2013 | 1,973,700 | $96,430 | BLS OEWS May 2013 Official statistic | Report |
| 2014 | 2,049,870 | $97,270 | BLS OEWS May 2014 Official statistic | Report |
| 2015 | 2,145,140 | $97,730 | BLS OEWS May 2015 Official statistic | Report |
| 2016 | 2,188,870 | $99,310 | BLS OEWS May 2016 Official statistic | Report |
| 2017 | 2,212,200 | $100,410 | BLS OEWS May 2017 Official statistic | Report |
| 2018 | 2,289,770 | $100,930 | BLS OEWS May 2018 Official statistic | Report |
| 2019 | 2,400,280 | $100,780 | BLS OEWS May 2019 Official statistic | Report |
| 2020 | 2,347,420 | $103,650 | BLS OEWS May 2020 Official statistic | Report |
| 2021 | 2,984,920 | $97,970 | BLS OEWS May 2021 Official statistic | Report |
| 2022 | 3,376,680 | $98,100 | BLS OEWS May 2022 Official statistic | Report |
| 2023 | 3,507,810 | $101,280 | BLS OEWS May 2023 (employment) Official statisticBLS OEWS May 2023 (pay) Official statistic | Report |
| 2024 | 3,584,420 | $102,950 | BLS OEWS May 2024 Official statistic | Report |
| 2025 | 3,503,020 | $105,770 | BLS OEWS May 2025 Official statistic | Report |
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