SIMPLY MANAGING

What Managers Do—And Can Do Better

By HENRY MINTZBERG

Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Henry Mintzberg
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60994-923-5

Contents

Welcome to Simply Managing………………………………………….vii1 Managing Beyond the Myths What management is and isn’t………………12 Managing Relentlessly The pressures of managerial work………………153 Managing Information, People, Action A model of managing…………….354 Managing Every Which Way The untold varieties of managing……………715 Managing on Tightropes The inescapable conundrums of managing………..1096 Managing Effectively Getting to the essence of managing……………..139Dedication………………………………………………………..177References………………………………………………………..179Index…………………………………………………………….187About the Author…………………………………………………..201

CHAPTER 1

ManagingBeyond the Myths

What management is and isn’t

A half century ago Peter Drucker (1954) put management on themap. Leadership has since pushed it off the map. We are nowinundated with great stories about the grand successes and evengrander failures of great leaders, but we have yet to come to gripswith the realities of being a manager.

This is a book about managing, simply managing—even if thejob is not simple. It considers the characteristics, contents, andvarieties 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, whichmeans not just managers, but everyone. We all need to understandit better, in order that it be practiced better. Some of the questionsaddressed in the book include these:

* Are managers too busy managing?

* Is leadership really separate from management?

* Is the Internet hindering managers as it helps them?

* How are managers to connect when the very nature of theirjob disconnects them from what they are managing?

* Where has all the judgment gone?

For years I have been asking groups of people in this job, “Whathappened the day you became a manager? Were you offered anyguidance at all?” The response has almost always been the same:puzzled looks, then shrugs. You are supposed to figure it out foryourself, like sex, I suppose, usually with equally embarrassinginitial consequences. Yesterday you were playing the flute ordoing surgery; today you find yourself managing people whoare doing these things. Everything has changed, yet you areon your own, confused and overwhelmed. This book is meantto help, not by offering easy answers—there are none—but byencouraging deeper understanding.

SOME SOBERING REALITY

In the late 1960s, for my doctoral dissertation, I observed fivemanagers during one week each. The result was my first book, TheNature of Managerial Work (1973). In the 1990s, I revisited thatwork, spending a day observing each of 29 managers in a varietyof settings—business, government, health care, NGOs—at senior,middle, and operating levels, in organizations ranging from 18 to800,000 employees (see Figure 1). The insights were revealing,and sobering. (Full descriptions of these days, and what Ilearned from them, can be found on www.mintzberg–managing.com.) I used these findings in my 2009 book Managing. SimplyManaging is a shortened version of Managing, reduced toits essence for managers and everyone else interested inmanagement. Here is some of that sobering reality.

“Top” managers take the long view, see the “big picture”;”lower”-level managers deal with the narrower, immediatethings. So why was Gord Irwin, front country manager ofthe Banff National Park in Canada, so concerned with theenvironmental consequences of a parking lot expansion at aski hill, while back in Ottawa, Norman Inkster, commissionerof the whole Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was watchingclips of last night’s television news to head off embarrassingquestions to his minister in Parliament that day?

And why was Jacques Benz, director-general of GSI, ahigh-technology company in Paris, sitting in on a meetingabout a customer’s project? He was a senior manager, afterall. Shouldn’t he have been back in his office developing grandstrategies? Paul Gilding, executive director of GreenpeaceInternational, was trying to do just that, with considerablefrustration. Who had it right?

One of the managers I studied was Alan Whelan in GlobalComputing and Electronics at BT in the U.K. Because he wasa sales manager, you might have expected him to have beenmeeting customers, or at least working with his people tohelp them sell to customers. On this day, Alan was selling,all right, but to an executive of his own company, who wasreluctant to sign off on his biggest contract. To use the conventionalwords of managing, was Alan planning, organizing,commanding, coordinating, or controlling?

Fabienne Lavoie, head nurse on 4 Northwest, a pre- and post-operationsurgical ward in a Montreal hospital, was workingfrom 7:20 a.m. to 6:45 p.m. at a pace that exhausted thisobserver. At one point, in the space of a few minutes, shewas discussing a dressing with a surgeon, putting througha patient’s hospital card, rearranging her scheduling board,speaking with someone in reception, checking on a patientwho had a fever, calling to fill in a vacancy, discussing somemedication, and chatting with a patient’s relative. Is managingsupposed to be that hectic?

Finally, what about the famous metaphor of the manageras orchestra conductor, magnificently in charge so that thewhole team can make beautiful music together? BramwellTovey of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra stepped off hispodium to talk about the job. “The hard part,” he said, “is therehearsal process,” not the performance. That’s less grand.And how about being in charge? “You have to subordinateyourself to the composer,” he said. So, does the orchestra”director” actually direct the orchestra—exercise that famousleadership? “We never talk about ‘the relationship.'” So muchfor that metaphor.

Before proceeding, it will be helpful to revisit three otherprominent myths that get in the way of seeing managing forwhat it is: somehow separate from leadership; a science, or atleast a profession; and that managers, like everyone else, live intimes of great change.

ENOUGH LEADERSHIP—TIME FOR “COMMUNITYSHIP”

It has become fashionable to distinguish leaders from managers.One does the right things, copes with change; the other doesthings right, copes with complexity (Bennis 1989; Kotter 1990;Zaleznik 1977). So tell me, who were the leaders and who themanagers in the examples just mentioned? Was Alan Whelanmerely managing at BT and Bramwell Tovey merely leading—on,and off, the podium? Was Jacques Benz of GSI doing the rightthings or doing things right?

How would you like to be managed by someone who doesn’tlead? That could be dispiriting. Well, then, why would you wantto be led by someone who doesn’t manage? That could be disengaging:how are such “leaders” to know what is going on? AsJim March of the Stanford Business School put it: “Leadershipinvolves plumbing as well as poetry” (in Augier 2004:173).

I observed John Cleghorn, chairman of the Royal Bank ofCanada. He developed a reputation in his company for callingthe office on his way to the airport to report a broken ATMmachine, and such things. This bank has thousands of suchmachines. Was John micromanaging? Maybe he was settingan example that others should follow: keep your eyes openfor such problems.

In fact, today we should be more worried about “macroleading”—frompeople in senior positions who try to manage by remotecontrol, disconnected from everything except “the big picture.”It has become popular to talk about us being overmanaged andunderled. I believe we are now overled and undermanaged.Instead of distinguishing leaders from managers, we shouldbe seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as managementpracticed well.

Moreover, leadership focuses on the individual, whereas thisbook sees managing together with leadership as naturallyembedded in what can be called communityship.

MANAGEMENT AS A PRACTICE,NOT A PROFESSION

After years of seeking these Holy Grails, it is time to recognizethat managing is neither a science nor a profession.

Certainly Not a Science

Science is about the development of systematic knowledge throughresearch. That is hardly the purpose of management, which isabout helping to get things done in organizations.

Management certainly applies science: managers have to useall the knowledge they can get. But effective managing is moredependent on art and is especially rooted in craft. Art produces”insights,” and “vision,” based on intuition. (Peter Drucker wrotein 1954 that “the days of the ‘intuitive’ manager are numbered”[p. 93]. Sixty years later, we are still counting.) And craft is aboutlearning from experience—working things out as the managergoes along.

Thus, as shown in Figure 2, managing can be seen as takingplace within a triangle where art, craft, and the use of sciencemeet. Art brings in the ideas and the integration; craft makesthe connections, building on tangible experiences; and scienceprovides the order, through systematic analysis of knowledge.

Managers deal with the messy stuff—the intractable problems,the complicated connections. This is what makes their work sofundamentally “soft” and why labels such as experience, intuition,judgment, and wisdom are so commonly needed to describe it.Put together a good deal of craft with the right touch ofart alongside some use of science, and you end up with ajob that is above all a practice, learned through experienceand rooted in context. There is no “one best way” to manage;it depends on the situation.

Nor a Profession

Engineering, too, is not a science so much as a practice in itsown right (Lewin 1979). But engineering uses a good deal ofscience, codified and certified as to its effectiveness. And so itcan be called a profession, which means that it can be taught inadvance of practice, out of context. In a sense, a bridge is a bridge,or at least steel is steel, even if its use has to be adapted to thecircumstances at hand. The same can be said about medicine.But not about management. Little of its practice has been reliablycodified, let alone certified as to its effectiveness. That is whyLinda Hill, in her study of new managers, found that they “hadto act as managers before they understood what the role was”(2003:45).

Ever since Frederick Taylor (1916) dubbed his work study methodthe “one best way,” we have been searching for the Holy Grail ofmanagement in science and professionalism. Today that lives onin the easy formulas of so much of the popular literature, such as”strategic planning,” and “shareholder value” (both oxymorons).Time and time again, the easy answers have failed.

In engineering and medicine, the trained expert can almostalways outperform the layperson. Not so in management. Fewof us would trust the intuitive engineer or physician, with noformal training. Yet we trust all kinds of managers who have neverspent a day in a management classroom (and we have suspicionsabout many who have spent two years in an MBA programs [seemy book Managers, Not MBAs [2004]).

The true professional knows better, as does the true scientist.But managers who believe they know better get in the way oftheir practice, because it has to be largely one of facilitation.The manager, by the definition used here, is responsible for anorganization or some unit in it. To use that old saying, managersget things done largely through other people. Managers haveto know a lot, especially about their specific contexts, andthey have to make decisions based on that knowledge. But,especially in large organizations and those concerned with”knowledge work,” the manager has to help bring out thebest in other people, so that they can know better, decidebetter, and act better.

MANAGING’S NOT CHANGING

This book draws on research from deep in the last century intoour new millennium. My own twenty-nine days of observationtook place in the 1990s. Books these days are not supposed todo such things—they are expected to be terribly up-to-date.

Let’s try the reverse: terribly up-to-date can get in the way. Werisk being mesmerized by the present and biased by the storieswe “know” all too well. A little time between us and events canbe a good thing.

Attend some speech on management. It is likely to begin withthe claim that “we live in times of great change”—a mantra ofso many managers. As you hear this, look at the clothes you arewearing. Notice the buttons, and ask yourself why, if we reallylive in times of great change, we are still buttoning buttons?Indeed, how come you drove to that speech in a car poweredby an internal combustion four-cycle engine? Wasn’t that usedin the Model T Ford?

Why didn’t you notice those buttons when you dressed thismorning or that old technology when you drove to work? Afterall, when you arrived there, you did notice some change in theoperating system of your computer. The fact is that we onlynotice what is changing. And most things are not. Informationtechnology has been changing; we all notice that. Same withthe economy of late. How about managing?

“For all the fashionable hype about leadership, it is unfashionablemanagement that is being practiced and its fundamentalcharacteristics have not changed” (Hales 2001:54). Managersdeal with different issues as time moves forward, but not withdifferent managing. If you doubt this, rent a good old movie aboutpeople managing a business or a war. Or look at the examplesfrom the 1990s presented earlier in this chapter: did any of thesestrike you as out of date?

In this book, I draw on many years of research about managing,some of it going back almost a century. I do this simplybecause I wish to use the best insight we have, and, as youshall see, some of the oldest are among the best. Managingis managing.

As I hope has become evident in this opening chapter, I havewritten this book not to reinforce conventional wisdom—toadd to all that stuffy managerial correctness—but to open upperspectives, so that we can all probe, ponder, and wonder aboutmanaging. I don’t want you to leave this book knowing. I wantyou to leave it, as I do, imagining, reflecting, questioning. Managersare only as good as their ability to work things outthoughtfully in their own way. As you will see in Chapter 5,this is a job of paradoxes, dilemmas, and mysteries that cannot beresolved. The only guaranteed result of any formula for managingis failure (including this one of course).

So off we go, to the delights, duties, and distresses of theancient and contemporary practice of managing.

CHAPTER 2

Managingrelentlessly

The pressures ofmanagerial work

Have a look at the popular images of managing—that conductoron the podium, those executives sitting at desks in New Yorkercartoons—and you get one impression of the job: well ordered,carefully controlled. Watch some managers at work and youwill likely find something quite different: a hectic pace, lots ofinterruptions, more responding than initiating.

This chapter describes these and other dynamic characteristicsof managing: how managers work, with whom, at what pace, andso on. Much of this evidence comes from the earlier studies, butmore recent research suggests it is fully up-to-date (e.g., Hales2001 and Tengblad 2006).

I first described these dynamics in my 1973 book. None ofthem could have come as a shock to anyone who ever spent aday in a managerial office, doing the job or observing it. Yet theystruck a chord with many people—especially managers—perhapsbecause they challenged some of our most cherished myths aboutthis job. Time and again, when I presented these conclusionsto groups of managers, the common response was “You makeme feel so good! While I thought that all those other managerswere planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling, I wasconstantly being interrupted, jumping from one issue to another,and trying to keep the lid on the chaos.”

KNOWING—AND KNOWING

Why should there have been such reactions to what these managersdoubtlessly knew already? My explanation is that, as humanbeings, we “know” in two different ways. Some things we knowconsciously, explicitly; we can verbalize them, often because wehave so often heard or read about them. Other things we knowviscerally, tacitly, based on our experience.
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