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
Fighting
Manage
Negotiate
Means
Basically
Managing
Helping
Actions
Fires
Action
Projects
Units
Done
Organization
Organizations
Sometimes
Fight
Contracts
Mean
Influence
Directly
Things
Fire
Managers
Influencing

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Organizations should be built and managers should be functioning so people can be naturally empowered. If someone's doing their job, if someone's working in one of your warehouses, say, they should know their job better than anybody. They don't need to be 'empowered,' but encouraged and left alone to be able to do what they know best.
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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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We're all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren't too screwed up.
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The idea that you can take smart but inexperienced 25-year-olds who never managed anything and turn them into effective managers via two years of classroom training is ludicrous.
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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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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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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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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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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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Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving.
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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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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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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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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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