Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87022 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-21
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 420 pages

From Library Journal
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.

About the Author
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."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 whole set of simple prescriptions called "time management" or use computers in the ways recommended by detached technical specialists). Unfortunately, in the absence of any real understanding of managerial work, much of this advice has proved false and wasteful. How can anyone possibly prescribe change in a phenomenon so complex as managerial work without first having a deep comprehension of it?

In the mid-1960s, James Webb, who ran NASA, wanted to be studied. NASA felt the need to justify its existence by spinning off practical applications of its innovations, and Webb counted its management processes among those innovations. Webb raised the idea with a professor of mine at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and since I was the only doctoral student then studying management there (as opposed to computer systems or mathematical models or motivating people, etc.), he approached me to study Webb as my doctoral thesis. I declined what seemed to be a crazy idea. This was MIT, after all, the bastion of science. Sitting in a manager's office and writing down what he did all day just didn't seem quite right. (Another professor had told me earlier that what an MIT doctoral thesis had to be above all was "elegant." He was not referring to the results.) In any event, I was going to do a thesis on how to develop a comprehensive strategic planning process for organizations. Luckily, and not for the last time in my life, forces outside of me saved me from myself.

The planning thesis didn't work out, for want of an organization willing to subject itself to such an exercise (or for want of my trying very hard to find one). Then I attended a conference at MIT to which a number of impressive people came to discuss the impact that the computer would have on the manager. They went nowhere; for two days they talked in circles, hardly getting beyond the contention that the managers' use of the computer should have something to do with the fact that their work was "unprogrammed" (whatever that was supposed to mean). It struck me that these people lacked a framework to enable them to understand managerial work. They certainly didn't lack an innate knowledge of the process -- they all worked with managers, and a number were managers themselves. What they lacked was a conceptual basis to consider the issue.

I learned two things at that conference. The first was that knowing explicitly was different from knowing implicitly, and both had great relevance for running organizations. The second was that there was an urgent need for someone to look carefully at what managers really did, that even at a place like MIT, what mattered in a thesis was not the elegance of the methodology but the relevance of the topic.

And so I did my first research on "the nature of managerial work" (the title of the book that resulted from the thesis). But not with James Webb, who was no longer available. Using a stopwatch (much as Frederick Taylor had done with factory workers years earlier), I observed in the course of one intensive week the activities of five chief executives: of a major consulting firm, a well-known teaching hospital, a school system, a high-technology firm, and a manufacturer of consumer goods. One week was not a long time, but I was more interested in the pace and nature of the work than in the unfolding of issues over the long term. The dissertation was completed in 1968, the book in 1973; two years later, the Harvard Business Review published the article that is reprinted here (with minor changes).

In orientation and tone, as well as in some of its central content, this article really set the pattern for my subsequent work. An article that followed in the New York Times (on October 29, 1976) labeled this description of managerial work "calculated chaos" and "controlled disorder." It also used a phrase that I have come to prefer for characterizing much of my writing: "celebrating intuition."

If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organize, coordinate, and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.

When they are called and told that one of their factories has just burned down, and they advise the caller to see whether temporary arrangements can be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is that planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? How about when they present a gold watch to a retiring employee? Or when they attend a conference to meet people in the trade? Or on returning from that conference, when they tell one of their employees about an interesting product idea they picked up there?

The fact is that those four words, which have dominated management vocabulary since the French industrialist Henri Fayol first introduced them in 1916, tell us little about what managers actually do. At best, they indicate some vague objectives managers have when they work.

My intention here is simple: to break the reader away from Fayol's words and introduce him or her to a more supportable, and what I believe to be a more useful, description of managerial work. This description is based on my own study of the work of five chief executives, supported by a few others on how various managers spent their time.

In some studies, managers were observed intensively ("shadowed" is the term some of them used); in a number of others, they kept detailed diaries of their activities; in a few studies, their records were analyzed. Various kinds of managers were studied -- foremen, factory supervisors, staff managers, field sales managers, hospital administrators, presidents of companies and nations, and even street gang leaders. These "managers" worked in the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Great Britain.

A synthesis of these findings paints an interesting picture, one as different from Fayol's classical view as a cubist abstract is from a Renaissance painting. In a sense, this picture will be obvious to anyone who has ever spent a day in a manager's office, either in front of the desk or behind it. Yet at the same time, this picture may turn out to be revolutionary, in that it throws into doubt so much of the folklore that we have accepted about the manager's work.

I first discuss some of this folklore and contrast it with some of the findings of systematic research -- the hard facts about how managers spend their time. Then I synthesize those research findings in a description of ten roles that seem to describe the essential content of all managers' jobs. In a concluding section, I discuss a number of implications of this synthesis for those trying to achieve more effective management.

SOME FOLKLORE AND FACTS ABOUT MAN

Customer Reviews

Coupling Analysis and Intuition
Mintzberg has always been an academic who studies management with a sympathetic and slightly amused view. This 1989 book is really worthwhile having in your biz library to quickly flip through before you run your next strategy session just to remind you of what you need to work towards.

In this book, Mintzberg was forming his ideas on Strategic Thinking versus Strategic Planning which, for me, was a hugely valuable distinction. He examines why the value of the hard economic facts win over the social goals in most corporate strategies - cost reduction and profit come ahead of the people and environment. He then develops his theme of the machine corporation versus the innovative organization with many useful insights for today's company struggling to become organic and 'ecosystem friendly'. The ideas are still highly applicable, intelligent and like a good wine, get better with time.

Fantastic collection from Canadian management guru
Henry Mintzberg is Professor of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. This book is split up in three parts, with each part consisting of three-to-nine chapters.

The first part is on management, "that process by which the people who are formally in charge of whole organizations or part of them try to direct or at least to guide what they do." This section builds largely on Mintzberg's early work, in particular on his research as PhD-student. In these chapters, Mintzberg really knocks down some famous myths and folklore about management.

The second and largest part is on organizations. Much of this section is based on Mintzberg's research into trying to classify organizations, "first from the perspective of structure and later from the perspective of power." There is an introduction into classification, seven chapters on each configuration, and a final chapter which looks at the broader issues of forces and forms in organizations.

The third and final part looks at our society of organizations and "how we try to influence them and how they influence us in turn and thereby make our lives happy and miserable." It discusses the fact that organizations influence our lives in a great many ways.

Yes, this a great collection from Canadian-born management guru Henry Mintberg who has always been a very challenging author. Although this book has been split up in three parts, each chapter can be read on its own. Several chapters have been published in various magazines, with many winning different types of awards. I recommend this book to all people interested in management, but in particular to MBA-students. The book is written in simple business US-English.

Should be mandatory reading
This is one of the few books that I consider great. As a practicing CEO I find it refreshing when common sense thinking shows up in the academic world. If you would like to read a well researched book with a very deep insight into the business world (both American, Canadian and European), this is absolutely your pick. Highly recommeded, even if it is a bit wordy from time to time.