Quote

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.

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Watch
Provoking
Motivational
Surprised
Control
Managers
Asks
Relate
Four
Likely
Words
Plan
Tell
Watches
Ordinate
Plans
Organise

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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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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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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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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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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Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
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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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The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.
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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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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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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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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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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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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