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

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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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.
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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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If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.
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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.
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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.
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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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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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Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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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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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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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