Henry Mintzberg: Manager

Henry Mintzberg is Canadian busines theorist. Explore interesting quotes on manager.
Henry Mintzberg: 28 quotes2 likes

“The professional administrators — especially those at higher levels — serve key roles at the boundary of the organization, between the professionals inside and interested parties — governments, client associations, and so on — on the outside. On the one hand, the administrators are expected to protect the professionals' autonomy, to "buffer" them from external pressures. On the other hand, the administrators are expected to woo these outsiders to support the organization, both morally and financially. Thus, the external roles of the manager—maintaining liaison contacts, acting as figurehead and spokesman in a public relations capacity, negotiating with outside agencies—emerge as primary ones in professional administration.”

Henry Mintzberg

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 326

“Effective managing therefore happens where art, craft, and science meet. But in a classroom of students without managerial experience, these have no place to meet — there is nothing to do.”

Henry Mintzberg

p 10
Managers Not MBAs (2005)

“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. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective.”

Henry Mintzberg

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 173

“The formalization of behavior takes formal power away from the workers and the managers who supervise them and concentrates it near the top of the line hierarchy and in the technostructure, thus centralizing the organization in both dimensions. The result is Type A decentralization. Training and indoctrination produces exactly the opposite effect: it develops expertise below the middle line, thereby decentralizing the structure in both dimensions (Type E). Putting these two conclusions together, we can see that specialization of the unskilled type centralizes the structure in both dimensions, whereas specialization of the skilled or professional type decentralizes it in both dimensions.”

Henry Mintzberg

Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 211

“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

Mintzberg (1994), (partly) cited in Douglas C. Eadie (1997) Changing by design: a practical approach to leading innovation in nonprofit organizations. p. 128

“Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.”

Henry Mintzberg

Attributed to Mintzberg in C.W. Cook, P.L. Hunsaker (2001) Management and organizational behavior. p. 58

“Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs — and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information.”

Henry Mintzberg

Source: Managers Not MBAs (2005), p. 249