Henry Mintzberg

4 Key excerpts on "Henry Mintzberg"

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  eBook - ePub

  Fifty Key Figures in Management

  • Morgen Witzel(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Mintzberg was born in Montreal on 2 September 1939. After studying engineering at McGill University and taking a degree in 1961 he joined Canadian National Railways, where he worked in the operations research department for several years before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take a master’s degree in 1965 and then a doctorate in 1968. He then returned to McGill University in Montreal to join the faculty of management and has remained there since, becoming a full professor in 1978. A prolific author, he has received many awards, served as president of the Strategic Management Society, and been elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the first management academic to be so recognised.

  Mintzberg went to MIT, says Stephen Rudman, with an idea of writing a book that would define exactly what it is that managers do in policy terms. Instead, his own studies and research showed him that the nature of the managerial task was nothing like as structured and ordered as most studies assumed it was, and its true nature was in fact quite hard to define. Mintzberg found what he later termed a managerial ‘folklore’, a body of literature on management studies which considered managers solely as rational beings, whose work day was taken up with ‘classic’ managerial tasks such as planning, coordinating and controlling. Decisions were made rationally, based on information which was carefully collected and analysed. Mintzberg found that this folklore was not an accurate reflection of reality. His own observations of managers in action found that, rather than being reflective practitioners, most were ad hoc respondents to unforeseen situations. Decisions were made quickly, often on the move, and usually based more on intuition and experience than considered analysis. Action was more important than reflection. Of the various tasks performed daily by the CEOs Mintzberg studied, half took less than ten minutes, and only 10 per cent took more than one hour.

  The results of Mintzberg’s study were published in The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), which is still regarded as one of his best books. The portrait of the manager and his task which emerges is one which many managers will recognise immediately as being close to their own: always under pressure of time, always ‘firefighting’, always working to find not necessarily the best solution but the one that can be implemented given the time and resources available. Mintzberg shows considerable sympathy for managers themselves, and is strongly critical of those who believe that managerial work can be classified and typified. In particular he attacks the notion, derived from Drucker

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  Management and Military Studies

  Classical and Current Foundations

  • Joseph Soeters(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

  Henry Mintzberg

  Managing in exceptional and military circumstances, strategy development, organization’s structures and closing gaps

  Henry Mintzberg (1939–) is probably the world’s premier management thinker and scholar today. His work is multi-fold, full of humour and all of it is applicable to the military. His work on the nature of managerial work connects to previous leadership studies but it is important in itself because it stresses the difference between planning and more intuitive managing and leading. This work has been proven to be useful in studying leaders in refugee camps as well as in military organizations on mission. He also nuanced the importance of planned, deliberate strategies pointing at the value of studying emergent strategies that are far more prevalent. As such, Mintzberg comes close to Von Clausewitz’s thinking about the limited use of deliberate strategies in action. With respect to his work on organizational structures Mintzberg has become famous for distinguishing various configurations that occur in the military too as well as for his plea to close the gaps between the various elements inside and between organizations.

  Managing exceptionally, managing militarily

  Henry Mintzberg gained worldwide fame with his doctoral thesis on the nature of managerial work. As we saw earlier, management and leadership have attracted scholars’ and practitioners’ attention for a long time. Think, for instance, of French scholar Henri Fayol who identified planning, organizing, coordination, and administration as key elements in management (Golden Pryor and Taneja, 2010). Remember also Chester Barnard’s work on the functions of the executive. Most of that previous work was directed towards what managers should do and pay attention to. Unlike his predecessors, however, Mintzberg (1973) did not aim at developing such normative theories, but he took an in-depth empirical look at what managers really do

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  Business

  The Ultimate Resource

  • Bloomsbury Publishing(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • A&C Black Business Information and Development

    (Publisher)

  I’m back to my other comment: there are old management questions we should be asking. I think just looking more deeply at management itself, and organizations themselves, and getting away from all this hype about technique and heroic leaders and just understanding more in depth. We need to develop managers who are much more thoughtful and believe things and understand things much more deeply than happens now.

  How can companies best promote enterprises that are a) profitable and b) good places for people to work?

  I have to repeat what I’ve been saying. What’s needed is more thoughtfulness. More of a social bonding process so there’s a sense of community in the organization, a belief in what the organization is trying to achieve. Look at the organizations that have sustained high performance—that are just good, remain good, stay good, and keep going. Like Shell, perhaps. There’s a sense of depth, there’s a sense of a culture, a sense of a deep understanding and belief in the business, a sense of commitment. These are all old-fashioned things, but they are important things.

  I think good managers are very thoughtful people. Some more thoughtfulness wouldn’t be a bad idea. Social responsibility as opposed to shareholder value wouldn’t be a bad idea.

  FOR MORE INFORMATION Book:

  Mintzberg, Henry, et al. Management? It’s Not What You Think! New York: AMACOM, 2010.

  See also:

  Choosing the Best Training Curriculum for You (here )

  Creating Value through People (here )

  Designing Corporate Systems for Success (here )

  Keeping Control in Nonhierarchical Organizations (here )

  Managing in a 24/7 Organization (here )

  Now! The Role of Urgency in Creating Positive Change (here )

  Transcending the Glass Ceiling (here )

  Workers without Borders: Creating Bonds When Workers Have No Loyalty (here )

  “Professional management is an invention that produced gain in organizational efficiency so great that it eventually destroyed organizational effectiveness.” Henry Mintzberg

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  Materiality and Managerial Techniques

  New Perspectives on Organizations, Artefacts and Practices

  • Nathalie Mitev, Anna Morgan-Thomas, Philippe Lorino, Francois-Xavier de Vaujany, Yesh Nama, Nathalie Mitev, Anna Morgan-Thomas, Philippe Lorino, Francois-Xavier de Vaujany, Yesh Nama(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  aspects of managerial techniques hardly feature in this type of work.

  Managerial Techniques, Innovation, Technology

  Another body of literature examines management, technology and innovation which presumably could be concerned with materiality , for instance books by Dodgson, Gann and Salter (2008 ), Gaynor (1996 ) or Tidd (2006 ). However, their concern is predominantly about how to manage technological innovation strategically to improve companies’ financial performance and competitive positioning. They cover frameworks, tools and techniques to manage innovation strategy , communities and networks; Research and Development (R&D), design and new product and service development, operations, production and commercialization; how to optimize investments in technology, achieve efficient business integration, link between strategic competencies, knowledge management, organizational learning and innovation; the measurement, management and improvement of organizational, technological and market competencies; and relationships with strategic, operational and financial performance . Pitsis, Simpson and Dehlin (2013 )’s edited handbook of managerial innovation has a broader aim by placing humans, their acts, practices, processes and fantasies at the core of innovation. Their contributors present organizational and managerial innovation

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