Henry Mintzberg is ‘perhaps the world’s premier management thinker,’ says Tom Peters.1 Mintzberg is Professor of Management at McGill University, Montreal and at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France.
He has recently been overseeing a venture by five business schools in Canada, the UK, France, India and Japan to create a next-generation master’s program for the development of managers.
Mintzberg’s original training was in mechanical engineering. He has a Ph.D. in management from MIT in Boston and honorary degrees from the Universities of Venice, Lund, Lausanne and Montreal.
His reputation has been made not by popularizing new techniques, but by rethinking the fundamentals of strategy and structure, management and planning. He takes an idiosyncratic, sometimes eccentric, but always interesting, view on virtually every aspect of managerial life. His work on strategy, in particular his ideas of ‘emergent strategy’ and
‘grass-roots strategy making’, has been highly influential.
He has won McKinsey prizes for the best article in the Harvard Business Review and is the author of Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organizations (1989), Structure in Fives:
Designing Effective Organizations (1983) The Nature of Managerial Work (1973), and The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning (1994).
Managerial Work • 165
hat managers actually do, how they do it and why, are fundamental questions. There are a W number of generally accepted answers. Managers have a vision of themselves – which they largely persist in believing and propagating – that they sit in solitude contemplating the great strategic issues of the day; that they make time to reach the best decisions and that their meetings are high-powered, concentrating on the meta-narrative rather than the nitty- gritty.
The reality largely went unexplored until Henry Mintzberg’s The Nature of Managerial Work. Instead of accepting pat answers to perennial questions, Mintzberg went in search of the reality. He simply observed what a number of managers actually did. The resulting book blew away the managerial mystique.
Instead of spending time contemplating the long term, Mintzberg found that managers were slaves to the moment, moving from task to task with every move dogged by another diversion, another call. The median time spent on any one issue was a mere nine minutes. In The Nature of Managerial Work, Mintzberg identifies the characteristics of the manager at work:
• performs a great quantity of work at an unrelenting pace
• undertakes activities marked by variety, brevity and fragmentation
• has a preference for issues which are current, specific and non-routine
• prefers verbal rather than written means of communication
• acts within a web of internal and external contacts
• is subject to heavy constraints but can exert some control over the work.’
From these observations, Mintzberg identified the manager’s
‘work roles’ as:
W
• Interpersonal roles
Figurehead: representing the organization/unit to outsiders
Leaden: motivating subordinates, unifying effort Liaiser: maintaining lateral contacts
• Informational roles
Monitor: of information flows
Disseminator: of information to subordinates
Spokesman: transmission of information to outsiders
• Decisional roles
Entrepreneur: initiator and designer of change Disturbance handler: handling non-routine events
Resource allocator: deciding who gets what and who will do what
Negotiator: negotiating.
‘All managerial work encompasses these roles, but the prominence of each role varies in different managerial jobs,’
writes Mintzberg.
Strangely, The Nature of Managerial Work has produced few worthwhile imitators. Researchers appear content to rely on neat case studies filled with retrospective wisdom and which are outdated as soon as they are written; or general interviews in which managers pontificate generally without being tied down to particulars. The actual work of managing enterprises often goes unnoticed behind the fashion and hyperbole.
Notes
1 Peters, Tom, ‘Strategic planning, RIP, 25 March, 1994.
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HENRY MINTZBERG
The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning 1994
Hamel on Mintzberg
“Henry views strategic planning as a ritual, devoid of creativity and meaning. He is undoubtedly right when he argues that planning doesn’t produce strategy. But rather than use the last chapter of the book to create a new charter for planners, Henry might have put his mind to the question of where strategies actually do come from!”
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Strategic Planning • 169
enry Mintzberg’s The Rise and Fall of Strategic Panning reflects a general dissatisfaction with the H process of strategic planning – research by the US Planning Forum found that only 25 percent of companies considered their planning processes to be effective and OC&C Strategy Consultants observed in a pamphlet that ‘the humane thing to do with most strategic planning processes is to kill them off’.
Mintzberg has long been a critic of formulae and analysis- driven strategic planning. In The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, he remorselessly destroys much conventional wisdom and proposes his own interpretations.
He defines planning as ‘a formalized system for codifying, elaborating and operationalizing the strategies which companies already have’. In contrast, strategy is either an
‘emergent’ pattern or a deliberate ‘perspective’. Mintzberg argues that strategy cannot be planned. While planning is concerned with analysis, strategy making is concerned with synthesis. Today’s planners are not redundant but are only valuable as strategy finders, analysts and catalysts. They are supporters of line managers, forever questioning rather than providing automatic answers. Their most effective role is in unearthing ‘fledgling strategies in unexpected pockets of the organization so that consideration can be given to (expanding) them’.
Mintzberg identifies three central pitfalls to today’s strategy planning practices.
First, the assumption that discontinuities can be predicated. Forecasting techniques are limited by the fact that they tend to assume that the future will resemble the past.
This gives artificial reassurance and creates strategies which are liable to disintegrate as they are overtaken by events.
He points out that our passion for planning mostly flourishes during stable times such as in the 1960s.
Confronted by a new world order, planners are left seeking to recreate a long-forgotten past.
H
Second, that planners are detached from the reality of the organization. Mintzberg is critical of the ‘assumption of detachment’. ‘If the system does the thinking,’ he writes, ‘the thought must be detached from the action, strategy from operations, (and) ostensible thinkers from doers . . . It is this disassociation of thinking from acting that lies close to the root of (strategic planning’s) problem.’
Planners have traditionally been obsessed with gathering hard data on their industry, markets and competitors. Soft data – networks of contacts, talking with customers, suppliers and employees, using intuition and using the grapevine – have all but been ignored.
Mintzberg points out that much of what is considered
‘hard’ data is often anything but. There is a ‘soft underbelly of hard data’, typified by the fallacy of ‘measuring what’s measurable’. The results are limiting, for example a pronounced tendency ‘to favor cost leadership strategies (emphasizing operating efficiencies, which are generally measurable) over product-leadership strategies (emphasizing innovative design or high quality, which tends to be less measurable)’.
To gain real and useful understanding of an organization’s competitive situation soft data needs to be dynamically integrated into the planning process. ‘Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes,’ writes Mintzberg. ‘While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generate wisdom. They may be difficult to “analyze”, but they are indispensable for synthesis – the key to strategy making.’
The third and final flaw identified by Mintzberg is the assumption that strategy-making can be formalized. The left- side of the brain has dominated strategy formulation with its emphasis on logic and analysis. Overly structured, this creates a narrow range of options. Alternatives which do not fit into the pre-determined structure are ignored. The right-side of
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