"The iconic Henry Mintzberg provides a crystal-clear map to the forms and forces that shape all human organizations, synthesizing his fifty years of research.
We live in a world of organizations, from our birth in hospitals until our burial by funeral homes. In between, we are educated, employed, entertained, and exasperated by organizations. We had better understand how these strange beasts really work. But where can we go to find out?
Welcome to Understanding Organizations . . . Finally! For half a century, Mintzberg has been observing organizations, advising them, engaging them, and escaping them. Here he offers a masterful update and revision of his 1983 classic, Structure in Fives.
Believing there is one best way to structure organizations is the worst way to do so. A better place to start is by recognizing different species of organizations. Mintzberg identifies seven-personal enterprises, programmed machines, professional assemblies, project pioneers, and others. He explores these forms and the seven forces that drive them toward hybrids and across their life cycles.
You will find no better guide to the care and feeding of these extraordinarily varied and vital creatures than this book."
"In forty-two succinct, surprising essays, legendary scholar Henry Mintzberg brings management down from the clouds and onto solid ground.
'Enough of heroic leadership, it's time for engaging management!' is the rallying cry from management and leadership giant Henry Mintzberg. He establishes this theme in the first story in the book, about the CEO of a failing airline who always flew comfortably in first class, blithely unaware of the terrible things happening with his customers in coach (in this case, being served famously inedible scrambled eggs). Managing can't be about sitting where you have become accustomed, insulating yourself--it has to be about eating the scrambled eggs.
So Mintzberg urges leaders to call their own call centers, work with their workers, expect extraordinary ideas from ordinary people. Be a keynote listener, not a keynote speaker. Don't say 'top management' if you won't say 'bottom management.' In this best-of collection from his popular, entertaining and irreverent blog, Mintzberg writes that he captures 'a lifetime of learning about managing and organizing and strategizing, while getting out many of the ideas that I buried in obscure publications... If some strike you as outrageous, please understand that my most outrageous ideas tend to be my truest.' This is Mintzberg at his most playful, but always with serious intent."
"Management giant Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to health care, arguing that many of the massive issues facing health care stem from the fact that it is not a cohesive system. To heal itself, health care must become less distant and opaque and more engaging and collaborative.
Mintzberg begins in part 1 by confronting myths about health care, including the following:
- We have a system of health care.
- Health-care institutions can be fixed with more heroic leadership.
- The health-care system can be fixed by more administrative engineering.
- The health-care system can be fixed by more categorizing and commodifying to facilitate more calculating.
- The health-care system can be fixed with increased competition.
- Health-care organizations can be fixed by running them more like businesses.
Part 2 examines how health care is organized, in relation to what we know about differentiation, separation, and integration in organizations and systems in general. Mintzberg shows that in health care, the inclination has been to do an awful lot more differentiating than integrating. This has resulted in all sorts of excessive separations: curtains across the specialties, sheets over the patients, and walls and floors between the administrators. The favored form of organizing health care-the professional organization-is the source of its great strength as well as its debilitating weakness.
Part 3 then offers guidelines to reframe the core components of health care: strategy, organization, scale, ownership, management, and the 'system' itself. For example, managing has to be about care more than cure, and organizing has to favor communityship over leadership, collaboration over competition."
"Enough of the imbalance that is causing the degradation of our environment, the demise of our democracies, and the denigration of ourselves. Enough of the pendulum politics of left and right and paralysis in the political center. We require an unprecedented form of radical renewal. In this book Henry Mintzberg offers a new understanding of the root of our current crisis and a strategy for restoring the balance so vital to the survival of our progeny and our planet.
With the collapse of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, Western pundits declared that capitalism had triumphed. They were wrong—balance triumphed. A healthy society balances a public sector of respected governments, a private sector of responsible businesses, and a plural sector of robust communities. Communism collapsed under the weight of its overbearing public sector.
Now the “liberal democracies” are threatened—socially, politically, even economically—by the unchecked excesses of the private sector.
Radical renewal will have to begin in the plural sector, which alone has the inclination and the independence to challenge unacceptable practices and develop better ones. Too many governments have been co-opted by the private sector. And corporate social responsibility can't compensate for the corporate social irresponsibility we see around us “They” won't do it. We shall have to do it, each of us and all of us, not as passive “human resources,” but as resourceful human beings.
Tom Paine wrote in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” He was right then. Can we be right again now? Can we afford not to be?"
"In 2009 Henry Mintzberg's Managing was named one of the best books of the year by Strategy+Business and Library Journal, the number two business book of the year by the Toronto Globe and Mail, one of the top ten academic titles by Choice magazine, and the management book of the year in a competition organized by the Chartered Management Institute in association with the British Library.
So this is clearly a book every manager should read. But one of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job—most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original book into a lean, action-oriented shortened version.
The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw led him to develop a new model of management, one firmly grounded in his conclusion that it is not a profession or a science. 'It is a practice,' he writes, 'learned primarily through experience and rooted in context.'
But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture, level in a hierarchy, and even personal style turn out to have a far different influence—sometimes much less—than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg also offers a compelling discussion of some of the inescapable conundrums of managing. How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get it done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it? How do you balance the need for change with the need for continuity?
He concludes with a provocative look at what being an effective manager really means, which he describes as 'engaging management.' This is the most authoritative and revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can have the greatest impact."
