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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
Strategy
Cognitive
Times
Involving
Making
Processes
Process
Subconscious
Social
Sophisticated
Human
Subtle
Humans
Complexes
Complex
Immensely

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Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.
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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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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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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.
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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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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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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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