Henry Mintzberg Quotes
When the world is predictable you need smart people. When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people.
An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of "human resources".
Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.
Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense
Organizational effectiveness does not lie in that narrow minded concept called rationality. It lies in the blend of clearheaded logic and powerful intuition
Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.
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.
Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.
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.
Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing
Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.
Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people.
While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.
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.
Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.
Most of the time, strategies should not be formulating strategy at all; they should be getting on with implementing strategies they already have.
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.
Corporations are economic entities, to be sure, but they are also social institutions that must justify their existence by their overall contribution to society.
To 'turn around' is to end up facing the same way. Maybe that is the problem, all the turning organizations around.
No generalizing beyond the data, no theory. No theory, no insight. And if no insight, why do research.
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.
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?
Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you're working at the big picture but don't know the details.
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.
If the private sectors are about markets and the public sectors are about governments, then the plural sector is about communities.
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.
Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.
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.
Why does every generation have to think that he lives in the period with the greatest turbulence?
