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Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Sense
Enormously
Influential
Phenomenon
Curious
Management
Paid
Generously
Risk
Significantly
Common
Devoid

More quotes by Henry Mintzberg

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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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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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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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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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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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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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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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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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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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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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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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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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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