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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
Influential
Phenomenon
Curious
Management
Generously
Paid
Significantly
Risk
Devoid
Common
Sense
Enormously

More quotes by 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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Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.
Henry Mintzberg
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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
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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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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
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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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Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
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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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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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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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
Henry Mintzberg
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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
Henry Mintzberg