Henry Mintzberg Quotes

When the world is predictable you need smart people. When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people.

Organizations are communities of human beings, not collections of human resources

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet

Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.

Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.

Learning is not doing; it is reflecting on doing.

A leader has to be one of two things: he either has to be a brilliant visionary himself, a truly creative strategist, in which case he can do what he likes and get away with it; or else he has to be a true empowerer who can bring out the best in others.

Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions

If you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organise, co-ordinate and control. Then watch what they do. Don't be surprised if you can't relate what you see to those four words.

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.

Strategies grow initially like weeds in a garden, they are not cultivated like tomatoes in a hothouse.

Strategic planning is not strategic thinking. Indeed, strategic planning often spoils strategic thinking, causing managers to confuse real vision with the manipulation of numbers.

Empowerment is what managers do to people. Engagement is what managers do with people.

Strategy-making is an immensely complex process involving the most sophisticated, subtle, and at times subconscious of human cognitive and social processes.

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

No job is more vital to our society than that of the manager. It is the manager who determines whether our social institutions serve us well or whether they squander our talents and resources.

Management is a curious phenomenon. It is generously paid, enormously influential, and significantly devoid of common sense

Never set out to be the best. It's too low a standard. Set out to be good. Do Your best.

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.

An obsession with control generally seems to reflect a fear of uncertainty.

Organizational effectiveness does not lie in that narrow minded concept called rationality. It lies in the blend of clearheaded logic and powerful intuition

An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of "human resources".

While hard data may inform the intellect, it is largely soft data that generates wisdom.

Corporations are social institutions. If they don't serve society, they have no business existing

Management and leadership are not separate spheres. The two skills work together in the larger realm of “communityship.