Henry Mintzberg Quotes

Corporations are social institutions. If they don’t serve society, they have no business existing

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.

What I have against M.B.A.s is the assumption that you come out of a two-year program probably never having been a manager – at least for full-time younger people M.B.A. programs – and assume you are ready to manage.

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.

We find that the manager, particularly at senior levels, is overburdened with work. With the increasing complexity of modern organizations and their problems, he is destined to become more so. He is driven to brevity, fragmentation, and superficiality in his tasks, yet he cannot easily delegate them because of the nature of his information.

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.

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.

Everyone is against micro managing but macro managing means you’re working at the big picture but don’t know the details.

If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate what you see to those four words.

The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.

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

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.