Mintzberg 5 Quotes & Sayings

1. The lecture notes that mission statements can be mundane, uninspiring, routine, and forgotten. They can also be nonexistent. Do you have a mission statement, an articulation of your purpose in life? If not, craft one now. If so, ask honestly, as Mintzberg suggests we do, whether it inspires you. — Anonymous

I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis. — Henry Mintzberg

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

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong. — Henry Mintzberg

Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it. — Henry Mintzberg

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? — Henry Mintzberg

Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills. — Henry Mintzberg

When the world is predictable you need smart people.
When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people. — Henry Mintzberg

Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions — Henry Mintzberg

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

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. — Henry Mintzberg

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

What you get out of an M.B.A. programme, no matter how much experience, is functional tools and understanding in disciplines: you'll understand economics, you'll understand marketing, finance, accounting. That, M.B.A. programmes do very well. — Henry Mintzberg

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet — Henry Mintzberg

If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities. — Henry Mintzberg

Organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources — Henry Mintzberg

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

A leader has to be one of two things: he either has to be a brilliant visionary himself, a truly creative strategist, in which case he can do what he likes and get away with it; or else he has to be a true empowerer who can bring out the best in others. — Henry Mintzberg

Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes. — Henry Mintzberg

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it — Henry Mintzberg

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

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

The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality. — Henry Mintzberg

An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty. — Henry Mintzberg

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. — Henry Mintzberg

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. — Henry Mintzberg

No generalizing beyond the data, no theory. No theory, no insight. And if no insight, why do research. — Henry Mintzberg

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

Data don't generate theory - only researchers do that. — Henry Mintzberg

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