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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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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Thinking
Strategic
Managers
Planning
Indeed
Spoils
Numbers
Causing
Vision
Confuse
Often
Spoil
Real
Manipulation
More quotes by Henry Mintzberg
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
Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
Henry Mintzberg
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
Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.
Henry Mintzberg
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
While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
Henry Mintzberg
Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
Henry Mintzberg
Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
Henry Mintzberg
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
If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities.
Henry Mintzberg
Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
Henry Mintzberg
Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
Henry Mintzberg
Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
Henry Mintzberg
Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
Henry Mintzberg
Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.
Henry Mintzberg
Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
Henry Mintzberg
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
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
Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.
Henry Mintzberg
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