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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Science
Craft
Crafts
Art
Managers
Change
Manage
Management
Organization
Meet
Practice

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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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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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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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.
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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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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Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
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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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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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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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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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No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.
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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
Henry Mintzberg
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What we call a financial crisis is really at its core a crisis of management, and not just a crisis of management, but a crisis of management culture. ...In other words, what you had is a detachment of people who know the business from people who are running the business.
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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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