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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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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Grows
Strategies
Like
Weeds
Initially
Cultivated
Weed
Strategy
Garden
Hothouse
Grow
Tomatoes

More quotes by 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.
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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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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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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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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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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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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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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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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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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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Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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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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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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
Henry Mintzberg