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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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Henry Mintzberg
Age: 85
Born: 1939
Born: September 2
Author
Economist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Montreal
Quebec
Ideas
Smart
Take
Training
Inexperienced
Years
Turn
Ludicrous
Never
Year
Olds
Turns
Managed
Idea
Classroom
Two
Managers
Anything
Effective

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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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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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Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.
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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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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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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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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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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 is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.
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Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.
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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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Learning is not doing it is reflecting on doing.
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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.
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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
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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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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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.
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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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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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Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
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