Managing by Henry Mintzberg (English) Paperback Book

Description: Managing by Henry Mintzberg Explores 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. Mintzberg analyses models, characteristics, and approaches, and examines commonalities and differences in various contexts, including business, government, health care, and social services. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. But "instead of distinguishing managers from leaders," Henry Mintzberg writes, "we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well." Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place- front and center.To gain an accurate picture of management as practiced rather than management as preached, Mintzberg watched twenty-nine different managers work a typical day. They came from business, government, and nonprofits, from all sorts of industries, including banking, policing, filmmaking, aircraft production, retailing, and health care, and worked in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. These observations form the empirical basis for this book.Mintzberg shows that in the real world managers cannot be the reflective, systematic planners idealized in most management books-realities like the unrelenting pace, the frequent interruptions, and the dizzying variety of activity make that impossible. Recognizing this, he outlines a new model of management- not a list of tasks but a dynamic process in which managers accomplish their purpose working through information, through people, and, more rarely, through direct action. Mintzberg describes the various roles managers adopt to function on these three planes, emphasizing that they must work on all of three simultaneously, determining the balance best suited to their specific, unique situation. Which is why management, Mitzberg insists, is not a profession-"it is a practice" he writes, "learned primarily through experience, and rooted in context."Having established the nature of modern management, Mintzberg looks at the varieties of managing experience. He identifies twelve factors that influence managing, highlighting the ones that are truly important (not necessarily the ones youd think) and offers an illuminating typology of different approaches to management-what he calls postures of managing. He provides insightful ways of dealing with some of the most vexing conundrums managers face, and ultimately pulls everything together to offer a comprehensive picture of true managerial effectiveness-an approach he calls "engaged management."This book is vintage Mintzberg- provocative, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-busting. It is the most authoritative and revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can have the greatest impact. Author Biography Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal and the winner of awards from the most prestigious academic and practitioner institutions in management (Harvard Business Review, Academy of Management, Association of Management Consulting Firms, and others). He is the author of fifteen books, including Managers Not MBAs, Strategy Safari, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, and Mintzberg on Management, and is a founding partner of For more information on his activities, Table of Contents Preface A Note to the Reader Chapter 1: Managing Ahead Chapter 2: The Dynamics of Managing Chapter 3: A Model of Managing Chapter 4: The Untold Varieties of Managing Chapter 5: The Inescapable Conundrums of Managing Chapter 6: Managing Effectively Appendix: Eight Days of Managing Bibliography Index About the Author Review "One of the most original minds in management." —Fast Company "Henry Mintzbergs views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys." —The Observer "Over the years I have asked many groups of managers what happened the day they became managers. First I get puzzled looks and then shrugs. Nothing, they report. You are supposed to figure it out—like sex, I suppose, usually with the same dire initial consequences. And from there, while we can find plenty of effective managers—if we can figure out what that means—we see a great deal of dysfunctional and often bizarre managerial behavior too. The costs are immense." —Henry Mintzberg Long Description 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. Review Quote "One of the most original minds in management." --Fast Company "Henry Mintzbergs views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys." --The Observer "Over the years I have asked many groups of managers what happened the day they became managers. First I get puzzled looks and then shrugs. Nothing, they report. You are supposed to figure it out--like sex, I suppose, usually with the same dire initial consequences. And from there, while we can find plenty of effective managers--if we can figure out what that means--we see a great deal of dysfunctional and often bizarre managerial behavior too. The costs are immense." --Henry Mintzberg Promotional "Headline" The definitive title on management from legendary and best-selling author Henry Mintzberg. Excerpt from Book Managing Ahead We know more about the motives, habits, and most intimate arcana of the primitive people of New Guinea or elsewhere, than we do of the denizens of the executive suites in Unilever House. Roy Lewis and Rosemary Stewart (1958:17) A half century has passed since the words above were written, and they still hold true. Yet it is easy enough to find out what managers do. Observe an orchestra conductor, not in performance but during rehearsal, to break through the myth of the manager on a podium. Sit in as the managing director of a high-technology company joins the discussion of a new project. Take a walk with the manager of a refugee camp as he scans attentively for signs of impending violence. Finding out what managers do is not the problem; interpreting it is. How do we make sense of the vast array of activities that constitute managing? A half century ago Peter Drucker (1954) put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off the map. We are now inundated with stories about the grand successes and even grander failures of the great leaders. But we have yet to come to grips with the simple realities of being a regular manager. This is a book about managing, pure if not simple. I have given it a broad title, Managing,1 because it is meant to be basic and comprehensive, about this fundamental practice in its untold variety. We consider the characteristics, contents, and varieties of the job, as well as the conundrums faced by managers and how they become effective. My objective is straightforward. Managing is important for anyone affected by its practice, which in our world of organizations means all of us. We need to understand it better, in order for it to be practiced better. Those befuddled by some or all of this practice--which hardly excludes managers themselves--should be able to reach for a book that provides insights from evidence, comprehensively, on the big questions. Few books even try; this one does. It addresses questions such as these: * Are managers too busy managing to contemplate the meaning of management? * Are leaders really more important than managers? * Why is so much managing so frenetic? And is the Internet making this better or worse? * Is the whole question of management style overrated? * How are managers to connect when the very nature of their job disconnects them from what they are managing? * Where has all the judgment gone? * How is anyone in this job to remain confident without becoming arrogant? Or to keep success from becoming failure? * Should managing be restricted to managers? Whatever Happened to Managing? I began my career on this subject: for my doctoral thesis, I observed one week in the working life of five chief executives. This led to a book called The Nature of Managerial Work (1973) and an article called "The Managers Job: Folklore and Fact" (1975). Both were well received. My research also led to a stream of replication studies.2 But that stream died out, and today we find remarkably little systematic study of managing. Many books are labeled "management," but not much of their contents are about managing (Brunsson 2007:7; Hales 1999:339).3 Look for the best evidence-based books on the subject, and you will likely settle on Len Sayless Leadership: What Effective Managers Really Do and How They Do It (1979), John Kotters The General Managers (1982), Robert Quinn et al.s Becoming a Master Manager (1990), and Linda Hills Becoming a Manager (first edition, 1992). Notice the dates. As a consequence, our understanding of managing has not advanced. In 1916, the French industrialist Henri Fayol published General and Industrial Administration (English translation, 1949), in which he described managing as "planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, and controlling." Eighty years later, a Montreal newspaper reported the job description of the citys new director-general: "responsible for planning, organizing, directing, and controlling all city activities" (Lalonde 1977:1). So remains our prevalent understanding as well. For years I have been asking groups of people in this job, "What happened the day you became a manager?" The response is almost always the same: puzzled looks, then shrugs, and finally comments such as "Nothing." You are supposed to figure it out for yourself, like sex, I suppose, usually with equivalently dire initial consequences. Yesterday you were playing the flute or doing surgery; today you find yourself managing people who are doing these things. Everything has changed. Yet you are on your own, confused. "The new managers learned through experience what it meant to be a manager" (Hill, second edition, 2003:9). Accordingly, in this book I revisit the nature of managerial work, retaining some of my earlier conclusions (in Chapter 2), reconceiving others (in Chapters 3 and 4), and introducing new ones (in Chapters 5 and 6). Some Sobering Reality * Because he was Sales Manager for Global Computing and Electronics at BT in the U.K., you might have expected Alan Whelan to have been meeting customers, or at least working with his people to help them sell to customers. On this day, Alan was selling, all right, but to an executive of his own company, who was reluctant to sign off on his biggest contract. Was Alan planning, organizing, commanding, coordinating, or controlling? * "Top" managers take the long view, see the "big picture"; "lower"-level managers deal with the narrower, immediate things. So why was Gord Irwin, Front County Manager of the Banff National Park, so concerned with the environmental consequences of a parking lot expansion at a ski hill, while back in Ottawa, Norman Inkster, Superintendent of the whole Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was watching clips of last nights television news to head off embarrassing questions to his minister in Parliament that day? * And why was Jacques Benz, Director-General of GSI, a high-technology company in Paris, sitting in on a meeting about a customers project? He was a senior manager, after all. Shouldnt he have been back in his office developing grand strategies? Paul Gilding, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, was trying to do just that, with considerable frustration. Who had it right? * Fabienne Lavoie, Head Nurse on 4 Northwest, a pre- and postoperation surgical ward in a Montreal hospital, was working from 7:20 A.M. to 6:45 P.M. at a pace that exhausted her observer. At one point, in the space of a few minutes, she was discussing a dressing with a surgeon, putting through a patients hospital card, rearranging her scheduling board, speaking with someone in reception, checking on a patient who had a fever, calling to fill in a vacancy, discussing some medication, and chatting with a patients relative. Is managing supposed to be that hectic? * Finally, what about the famous metaphor of the manager as orchestra conductor, magnificently in charge so that the whole team can make beautiful music together? Bramwell Tovey of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra stepped off his podium to talk about the job. "The hard part," he said, "is the rehearsal process," not the performance. Thats less grand. And how about being in such control? "You have to subordinate yourself to the composer," he said. So, does the orchestra "director" actually direct the orchestra--exercise that famous leadership? "We never talk about the relationship," was the response. So much for that metaphor. Twenty-nine Days of Managing I could go on. This is the tip of the managerial iceberg. I spent a day with each of these and other managers--twenty-nine in all--observing, interviewing, reviewing their diaries over a week or a month, to interpret what was going on. The evidence from that research informs this book. As shown in Table 1.1, these managers came from business, government, health care, and the social sector (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], not-for-profits, etc.),4 and from all sorts of organizations, including banking, policing, filmmaking, aircraft production, retailing, telecommunications. Some of these organizations were tiny, others huge (from 18 to 800,000 employees). These managers spanned all the conventional levels of the hierarchy, from the so-called top and middle to the base. Some worked in major urban centers (London, Paris, Amsterdam, Montreal); others, in more out-of-the-way places (Ngara, Tanzania; New Minas, Nova Scotia; the Banff National Park in western Canada). Some were observed singly; others, in clusters (e.g., three managers of the Canadian parks, who reported to each other, on three successive days). For each day (or cluster of days), I described what I saw and then interpreted it in conceptual terms. I let each speak for itself. And speak they did--for example, about how old-fashioned managing by exception can be very up-to-date; about how the managers of Greenpeace have to give as much attention to the sustainability of their organization as to the sustainability of our environment; about how the real politics of government may happen on the ground, where the bears meet the tourists. These days also spoke to the wide variety of contexts in which management happens: I found myself holding on the back of a motorcycle for dear life at it raced through Paris, from one press interview to another; sitting alone in a concert hall of 2,222 velvet seats watching a conductor rehearsing an orchestra; lunching once in a restaurant established by an enterprising refugee in an African camp, and another time freezing in the Greenpeace cafeteria in Description for Sales People *Tens of millions of people in the U.S. and other countries work as managers, administrators, executives, supervisors, and leaders in all types of large and small organizations. This is the most authoritative and revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, the challenges of their jobs, and how they can be more effective managers. *Referred to by Tom Peters as "perhaps the worlds premier management thinker," Henry Mintzberg is a bestselling author (Managers Not MBAs, The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, etc.) and one of the most honored and esteemed management scholars in the world. *This book is vintage Mintzberg: revealing, provocative, irreverant, carefully researched, myth-busting. Details ISBN1605098744 Short Title MANAGING Language English ISBN-10 1605098744 ISBN-13 9781605098746 Media Book Format Paperback Author Henry Mintzberg Pages 320 Imprint Berrett-Koehler Place of Publication San Francisco Country of Publication United States DEWEY 658 Residence -CN Affiliation McGill University McGill University, Canada McGill University McGill U Series Berrett-koehler Year 2011 Publication Date 2011-03-07 AU Release Date 2011-03-07 NZ Release Date 2011-03-07 US Release Date 2011-03-07 UK Release Date 2011-03-07 Publisher Berrett-Koehler Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:121958452;

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