Managing Leadership^®

Henry Mintzberg is known as an eminently practical academic researcher: he doesn’t just do surveys and analyses of stock market data and the like. Nor does he do interviews alone – he goes to managers’ workplaces, follows them around, and notes what they actually do – not what they say or think they do.

He is also regarded as something of an iconoclast. If what he sees doesn’t correspond with what others are reporting or propounding, he says so, and often with refreshing gusto.

The result is an at once exciting and exasperating cocktail of what actual practicing managers can readily recognize as really fruitful insight, and devastatingly delivered denunciations of otherwise unchallenged conventional wisdom or excoriating assessments of runaway fads in management development and practice. And on top of this, he sometimes serves up some unexpected degrees of self-promotional material about his own solutions, such as the entire second half of a previous book, “Managers Not MBAs” (although it must be said that there is much advantage to be gained from looking at that presentation as a case study of effective management training – please see review here).

Now, with “Managing,” Mintzberg provides a wonderfully comprehensive summary of the view of management he has developed over an especially perceptive, on-the-ground career observing and reflecting on the field. All of his idiosyncrasies are on full display in this book – immediately recognizable glimpses of hard-mined wisdom; a bent for practical, actionable working models; an impatience for “big-idea” concepts supported more by rhetoric than real-life evidence; a critical eye that can sometimes seem to peer past all the smoke to the reality beyond, and at other times can appear to be blurred by the mote of cussed contrariness.

The result is an endlessly engaging, enlightening, and thought-provoking book for everyone involved in management from the classroom to the boardroom. Brilliantly dismissing the idea of management as a profession, Mintzberg just as convincingly portrays it as a practice – one that can be learned but not taught.

Moreover, while it is best viewed as a set of practices, he explains why these vary so widely from level to industry that far from being subject to unequivocal delineation, they are best thought of as pursued by the best managers across the three planes of information, action, and people. The book is largely an elaboration of this insight into perspectives on managing that liberate managers from unsubstantiated orthodoxy so that they can develop – and learn to improve and hone through effective reflection – their own practices that contribute to the whole – or that constitute, as Peter Drucker would say, true executive behavior.

One more thing you will find interesting in this book is that Mintzberg refers to research and writing produced sometimes decades ago. He does this conspicuously both to take managers’ eyes off of artificially trendy “currency” and a sometimes overwrought and ill-disciplined emphasis on change, and turn them back to writing that is good because it is timeless, rather than because it was produced yesterday and will be superseded tomorrow. In fact, this is the only major author in the field – and an academic at that – I can think of who not only honestly refers to possibly the greatest management thinker of them all, Mary Parker Follett, but does so frequently and with genuine substance.

“Managing” by Henry Mintzberg is highly recommended – indeed, a must-read. You will find much to agree and disagree with – all of which will sharpen your own thinking and practice as a manager. Pick up a copy and enjoy!

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This post is a part of a series. You can learn about and link to the other articles here: Managing life, work, and life at work

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Today’s tip: Speaking of must-reads, please be sure to see what Steve Roesler has to say about conflict at work – what it is and what it means in real life.

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