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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
Weed
Strategy
Garden
Hothouse
Grow
Tomatoes
Grows
Strategies
Like
Weeds
Initially
Cultivated

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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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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
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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 is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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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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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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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.
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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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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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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.
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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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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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