Mintzberg on Management

Mintzberg on Management

Henry Mintzberg revolutionized our understanding of what managers do in The Nature of Managerial Work, his landmark book. Now in this comprehensive new volume, Mintzberg broadens his vision to explore not only the function of management, but also that of the organization itself and its meaning for society. A treasury of the dynamic and iconoclastic ideas that have made him a mentor to an entire younger generation of leading management thinkers, Mintzberg on Management presents the collective wisdom of this influential scholar -- in strategy, structure, power, and politics -- the gestalt of organizational theory. Known as the guru of bottom-up management, Mintzberg broke with convention by actually going inside companies to witness the business of business. Revealing how strategy is really formulated, he shows here that successful strategy is rarely, if ever, born in solitary contemplation; rather, the elements usually come together in the heat of battle. In addition, Mintzberg identifies the keys to outstanding management. He begins by describing the good manager who successfully combines interpersonal, informational, and decision-making roles. However, effectiveness in management, Mintzberg demonstrates, depends not only on a manager's embodiment of these necessary qualities, but also his or her insight into their own work. Performance depends on how well he understands and responds to the pressures and dilemmas of the job. As Mintzberg illustrates, it is often the case that job pressures can drive a manager to be superficial in his actions -- to overload himself with work, encourage interruption, respond quickly to every stimulus, avoid the abstract, make decisions in small increments, and do everything abruptly. The effective manager surmounts the pressures of superficiality by stepping back in order to see a broad picture, and making use of analytical inputs. Keeping his focus on how real companies work, Mintzberg challenges traditional assumptions and answers from the grass roots level such essential questions as "How do organizations function and structure themselves?....How do their power relations develop and their goals form?" And, "By what processes do managers make important strategic decisions?" With the same hard-hitting impact of his popular seminars for executives, Mintzberg on Management conveys Mintzberg's latest ideas on management and organization, including "Society Is Unmanageable as a Result of Management" and "Training Managers, Not MBAs? As solid and reality oriented in its approach as his classic The Nature of Managerial Work, this volume promises to have comparable sweeping influence on managers in all fields. This book brings together Mintzberg's thoughts on organizations and how they are managed. The essays, many published previously in book or journal form, are grouped into three sections. The first deals with the world of management--what the manager does, the process of strategy development, and the need for both analysis and intuition in management. The second focuses on how differently configured organizations achieve coordination and formulate strageties, the role of politics in organizations, and the driving forces in organizations. The final section addresses the role of the large organization in society. The book raises many important questions. Highly recommended. - Jane M. Kathman, Coll. of St. Benedict, St. Joseph, Minn. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. Henry Mintzberg is Bronfman Professor of Management at McGill University and is president of the Strategic Management Society. He is also a two-time winner of the McKinsey Award for the best Harvard Business Review article. His first McKinsey Award recognized "The Manager's Job: Folklore and Fact," published in 1975, and in 1987 Mintzberg received his second McKinsey Award for "Crafting Strategy." Chapter 1 THE MANAGER'S JOB Folklore and Fact When we think of organization, we think of management. Of course, there is a great deal more to organizations than managers and the management systems they create. But what distinguishes the formal organization from a random collection of people -- a mob, an informal group -- is the presence of some system of authority and administration, personified by one manager or several in a hierarchy to knit the whole effort together. That being the case, and given the love affair the American people in particular have had with the manager for more than a century, from Horatio Alger to Lee lacocca, it is surprising how little study there has been of what managers actually do. Like thousands of other students at the time, I took an MBA, a degree ostensibly designed to train managers, without questioning the fact that no one ever discussed in a serious way what managers really did. Imagine a program in medicine without ever a comment on the work of the doctor. There has certainly been no shortage of material on what managers should do (for example, follow a who