Henry Mintzberg Quotes
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Organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources
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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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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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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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Data don't generate theory - only researchers do that.
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We have great managers who havent spent a day in management school. Do we have great surgeons that havent spent a day in surgical school?
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It is time to recognize conventional MBA programs for what they are - or else to close them down. They are specialized training in the functions of business, not general educating in the practice of management.
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That is the trouble with flying: We always have to return to airports. Thank of how much fun flying would be if we didn't have to return to airports.
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While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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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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Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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To 'turn around' is to end up facing the same way. Maybe that is the problem, all the turning organizations around.
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You can teach all sorts of things that improve the practice of management with people who are managers. What you cannot do is teach management to somebody who is not a manager, the way you cannot teach surgery to somebody whose not a surgeon.
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If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.
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Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet
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An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.
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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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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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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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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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Organizations should be built and managers should be functioning so people can be naturally empowered. If someone's doing their job, if someone's working in one of your warehouses, say, they should know their job better than anybody. They don't need to be 'empowered,' but encouraged and left alone to be able to do what they know best.
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Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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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.
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The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.
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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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Organizational effectiveness does not lie in that narrow minded concept called rationality. It lies in the blend of clearheaded logic and powerful intuition
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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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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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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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Technologies tend to undermine community and encourage individualism.
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