Henry Mintzberg quotes

Henry Mintzberg is a Canadian academic and business author, recognized for his significant contributions to management theory. His research emphasizes the real-world complexity of managerial work and the importance of practical experience in organizations. He has influenced generations of managers and scholars through his books and innovative educational programs. Here are 61 of his quotes:

Five coordinating mechanisms seem to explain the fundamental ways in which organizations coordinate their work: mutual adjustment, direct supervision, standardization of work processes, standardization of work outputs, and standardization of worker skills.

Henry Mintzberg

Anecdotal data is not incidental to theory development at all, but an essential part of it.

Henry Mintzberg

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.

Henry Mintzberg

Strategy making needs to function beyond the boxes to encourage the informal learning that produces new perspectives and new combinations... Once managers understand this, they can avoid other costly misadventures caused by applying formal techniques, without judgement and intuition, to problem solving.

Henry Mintzberg

Theory is a dirty word in some managerial quarters. That is rather curious, because all of us, managers especially, can no more get along without theories than libraries can get along without catalogs - and for the same reason: theories help us make sense of incoming information.

Henry Mintzberg

Data don't generate theory – only researchers do that.

Henry Mintzberg

The professional administrators - especially those at higher levels - serve key roles at the boundary of the organization, between the professionals inside and interested parties - governments, client associations, and so on - on the outside. On the one hand, the administrators are expected to protect the professionals' autonomy, to "buffer" them from external pressures. On the other hand, the administrators are expected to woo these outsiders to support the organization, both morally and financially. Thus, the external roles of the manager-maintaining liaison contacts, acting as figurehead and spokesman in a public relations capacity, negotiating with outside agencies-emerge as primary ones in professional administration.

Henry Mintzberg

Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes.

Henry Mintzberg

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.

Henry Mintzberg

I describe management as arts, crafts and science. It is a practice that draws on arts, craft and science and there is a lot of craft - meaning experience - there is a certain amount of craft meaning insight, creativity and vision, and there is the use of science, technique or analysis.

Henry Mintzberg

You can teach all sorts of things that improve the practice of management with people who are managers. What you cannot do is teach management to somebody who is not a manager, the way you cannot teach surgery to somebody whose not a surgeon.

Henry Mintzberg

For two hundred and fifty years, from the second half of the eighteenth Century on, Capitalism was the dominant social reality. For the last Hundred years, Marxism was the dominant social ideology. Both are rapidly being superseded by a new and very different society. The new society – and it is already here – is a post-capitalist society... The center of gravity in the post-capitalist society – its structure, its social and economic dynamics, its social classes, and its social problems – is very different from the one that dominated the last two hundred and fifty years.

Henry Mintzberg

This obsession with leadership... It's not neutral; it's American, this idea of the heroic leader who comes in on a white horse to save the day. I think it's killing American companies.

Henry Mintzberg

Managers who don't lead are quite discouraging, but leaders who don't manage don't know what's going on. It's a phony separation that people are making between the two.

Henry Mintzberg

The real challenge in crafting strategy lies in detecting subtle discontinuities that may undermine a business in the future. And for that there is no technique, no program, just a sharp mind in touch with the situation.

Henry Mintzberg

The prime occupational hazard of a manager is superficiality.

Henry Mintzberg

We're all flawed, but basically, effective managers are people whose flaws are not fatal under the circumstances. Maybe the best managers are simply ordinary, healthy people who aren't too screwed up.

Henry Mintzberg

So technologies, whether it is a telephone or an iPhone, computers in general or automobiles, television even, all individualize us. We all sit in front of our iPhones and communicating but are we really communicating?

Henry Mintzberg

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.

Henry Mintzberg

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.

Henry Mintzberg

Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing. T. S. Eliot writes in one of his poems, "We had the experience but missed the meaning.” Reflection is about getting the meaning.

Henry Mintzberg

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. And he can do little to increase his available time or significantly enhance his power to manage. Furthermore, he is driven to focus on that which is current and tangible in his work, even though the complex problems facing many organizations call for reflection and a far-sighted perspective.

Henry Mintzberg