Quote

Basically, managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action. Sometimes, managers manage actions directly. They fight fires. They manage projects. They negotiate contracts.

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Action
Projects
Units
Done
Organization
Organizations
Sometimes
Fight
Contracts
Mean
Influence
Directly
Things
Fire
Managers
Influencing
Fighting
Manage
Negotiate
Means
Basically
Managing
Helping
Actions
Fires

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Managers who don't lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don't manage don't know what's going on. It's a phony separation that people are making between the two.
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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
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Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
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Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.
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Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.
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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
Henry Mintzberg
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What I have against M.B.A.s is the assumption that you come out of a two-year program probably never having been a manager - at least for full-time younger people M.B.A. programs - and assume you are ready to manage.
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We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information.
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Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.
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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.
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If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities.
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Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.
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Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
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An unsuccessful manager blames failure on his obligations the effective manager turns them to his own advantage. A speech is a chance to lobby...a visit to an important customer a chance to extract trade information.
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So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating?
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Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.
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This obsession with leadership... It's not neutral it's American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it's killing American companies.
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Companies are communities. Theres a spirit of working together. Communities are not a place where a few people allow themselves to be singled out as solely responsible for success.
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