Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Mintzberg calls attention to numerous popular but false views about the nature of managerial work, separates fact from folklore, and provides the best information yet published on what managers do and how they do it. He analyzes models, characteristics, and approaches to managing. He examines commonalities and differences in managing in various contexts, including business, government, health care, and social services. By shadowing 29 managers through a day in their lives, he reveals how managing is affected by many factors -- including national and industry cultures, organizational differences, level of the manager in the organization, and personal styles -- and examines the various strategies that managers adopt to deal with these factors. Mintzberg then identifies the main "conundrums" or dilemmas that managers must wrestle with (such as delegating versus retaining control, balancing order and flexibility, and gathering more data versus needing to take action) and describes how managers deal with those conundrums. And he offers provocative and powerful new understandings of what makes managers effective and ineffective.
Synopsis
A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. Henry Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. "We should be seeing managers as leaders." Mintzberg writes, "and leadership as management practiced well."
This landmark book draws on Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine managers, in business, government, health care, and the social sector, working in settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw--the pressures, the action, the nuances, the blending--compelled him to describe managing as a practice, not a science or a profession, learned primarily through experience and rooted in context.
But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture and level in hierarchy, even personal style, turn out to have less influence than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg looks at how to deal with some of the inescapable conundrums of managing, such as, How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get things done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it?
This book is vintage Mintzberg: iconoclastic, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-breaking. Managing may be the most revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can do it better.
About the Author
Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. He was selected as Distinguished Scholar for the year 2000 by the Academy of Management and won its George R. Terry Award for the best book of 1995 (The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning). Two of his articles in the Harvard Business Review have won the coveted McKinsey prizes. He has served as President of the Strategic Management Society, is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (the first from a management faculty), and has been named an Officer of the Order of Canada. Mintzberg is the author of fourteen books. He was recently ranked #9 in The Wall Street Journal's Top 20 Business Thinkers and #16 on "The Thinkers 50" -- a list published in the Financial Times of "the world's most important and influential business thinkers."