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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

Henry Mintzberg

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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Essential
Essentials
Development
Theory
Part
Anecdotal
Incidental
Data

More quotes by Henry Mintzberg

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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.
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.
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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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Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
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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.
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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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.
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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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