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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Planning
Opposite
Opposites
Strategy
Consequence
Starting
Point

More quotes by Henry Mintzberg

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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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?
Henry Mintzberg
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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
Henry Mintzberg
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
Henry Mintzberg
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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
Henry Mintzberg
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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
Henry Mintzberg
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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg