Quote

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
Strategic
Thinking
Managers
Planning
Indeed
Spoils
Numbers
Causing
Confuse
Vision
Spoil
Often
Manipulation
Real

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Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
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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.
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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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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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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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Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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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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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No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.
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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 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.
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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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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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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