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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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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Humans
Complexes
Complex
Immensely
Strategy
Cognitive
Times
Involving
Making
Processes
Process
Subconscious
Social
Sophisticated
Human
Subtle

More quotes by Henry Mintzberg

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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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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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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.
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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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.
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.
Henry Mintzberg
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Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
Henry Mintzberg
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My feeling about executive bonuses is that any candidate for a chief executive job who even raises the issue of bonuses should be dismissed out of hand.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
Henry Mintzberg
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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.
Henry Mintzberg
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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
Henry Mintzberg