Mintzberg – Distinguish Leadership From Management At Your Peril
Henry Mintzberg is stirring the pot again. For those of you who don’t know who Mintzberg is, he’s a professor at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Mintzberg co-founded the International Masters Program in Practicing Management as an alternative to an MBA program. He likes to challenge conventional wisdom about management, and he does a great job at getting people to react to his views, though not the way you might want people to react.
Mintzberg earned quite a few critics with his 2004 book, Managers Not MBAs, in which he slammed MBA programs. Mintzberg said “MBA programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences. No one can create a manager in a classroom.” Mintzberg even implied that the MBA program at McGill (his employer) was ineffective.
Mintzberg’s latest book, called Managing, is sure to garner lots of attention from his critics. In this book he argues that good middle management is the key to good leadership. Accordingly, rather than distinguishing between leadership and management, Mintzberg says “we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well.” Mintzberg studied the work of twenty-nine different managers and suggests that managers are hindered from being effective planners due to the realities of today’s workplace such as heavy workloads and constant interruptions. To overcome these obstacles, he offers a new management paradigm in which managers can become effective leaders by working through information, people, and direct action.
If you want a fresh perspective on how management can accomplish their goals, I highly recommend this book. His writing style makes it easy to read and whether you agree with him or not, there’s no denying that his views are impactful.
Article written by Andrea Davis
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Henry Mintzberg is a very educated man, I wish I had info like this earlier, when I was in my school doing homeworks.
I would say that it is vital to find a style, that is perfect for every situation folks.
Henry Mintzberg is one of the world’s leading management thinkers, and the author of 11 books on management, including the forthcoming Managing Publicly. Management is actually a facilitating activity that depends on the immediate context. Management as an art has been influenced by scholars such as Henry Mintzberg and Peter Drucker, and is often evident in complex theories of management. For example, his 1989 Mintzberg on Management contains a major section, which could be seen as a precursor to the present book, while his career has been deeply concerned with the education of managers in the widest sense, rather than simply with teaching the MBA. Effective management is a lot more complex than I originally thought; although a lot of the subtle nuances came easily to me; still, I never gave a lot of the skills required much thought, until now.
Professor Mintzberg is a great expert in management and is quite critical about consulting business. He has also won the McKinsey Award twice for publishing the best article.
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I think every manager and management team could take a listen to Mintzberg’s words. Most of us don’t see our management team as leaders at all.