Managing (Financial Times)

mintzberg Calls Attention To Numerous Popular But False Views About The Nature Of Managerial Work, Separates Fact From Folklore, And Provides The Best Information Yet Published On What Managers Do And How They Do It. He Analyzes Models, Characteristics, And Approaches To Managing. He Examines Commonalities And Differences In Managing In Various Contexts, Including Business, Government, Health Care, And Social Services. By Shadowing 29 Managers Through A Day In Their Lives, He Reveals How Managing Is Affected By Many Factors — Including National And Industry Cultures, Organizational Differences, Level Of The Manager In The Organization, And Personal Styles — And Examines The Various Strategies That Managers Adopt To Deal With These Factors. Mintzberg Then Identifies The Main "conundrums" Or Dilemmas That Managers Must Wrestle With (such As Delegating Versus Retaining Control, Balancing Order And Flexibility, And Gathering More Data Versus Needing To Take Action) And Describes How Managers Deal With Those Conundrums. And He Offers Provocative And Powerful New Understandings Of What Makes Managers Effective And Ineffective. One of our most distinguished scholars offers a bold new view of the theory and practice of effective management. Named one of the best management books of 2009 by strategy+business magazine, the Toronto Globe, and Mail and Library Journal. Winner of the Axiom gold medal in the leadership category. A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. But "instead of distinguishing managers from leaders," Henry Mintzberg writes, "we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well." Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. To gain an accurate picture of management as practiced rather than management as preached, Mintzberg watched twenty-nine different managers work a typical day. They came from business, government, and nonprofits, from all sorts of industries, including banking, policing, filmmaking, aircraft production, retailing, and health care, and worked in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. These observations form the empirical basis for this book. Mintzberg shows that in the real world managers cannot be the reflective, systematic planners idealized in most management books-realities like the unrelenting pace, the frequent interruptions, and the dizzying variety of activity make that impossible. Recognizing this, he outlines a new model of management: not a list of tasks but a dynamic process in which managers accomplish their purpose working through information, through people, and, more rarely, through direct action. Mintzberg describes the various roles managers adopt to function on these three planes, emphasizing that they must work on all of three simultaneously, determining the balance best suited to their specific, unique situation. Which is why management, Mitzberg insists, is not a profession-"it is a practice" he writes, "learned primarily through experience, and rooted in context." Having established the nature of modern management, Mintzberg looks at the varieties of managing experience. He identifies twelve factors that influence managing, highlighting the ones that are truly important (not necessarily the ones you'd think) and offers an illuminating typology of different approaches to management-what he calls postures of managing. He provides insightful ways of dealing with some of the most vexing conundrums managers face, and ultimately pulls everything together to offer a comprehensive picture of true managerial effectiveness-an approach he calls "engaged management." This book is vintage Mintzberg: provocative, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-busting. It 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 A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. Henry Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. “We should be seeing managers as leaders.” Mintzberg writes, “and leadership as management practiced well.” This landmark book draws on Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine managers, in business, government, health care, and the social sector, working in settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw—the pressures, the action, the nuances, the blending—compelled him to describe managing as a practice, not a science or a profession, learned primarily through experience and rooted in context. But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture and level in hierarchy, even personal style, turn out to have less influence than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg looks at how to deal with some of the inescapable conundrums of managing, such as, How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get things done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it? This book is vintage Mintzberg: iconoclastic, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-breaking. Managing may be the most revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can do it better. Henry Mintzberg first became a star with his 1973 classic book, The Nature of Managerial Work, which overturned many standard views of what managers do and how they do it. Since then, Mintzberg has written many other important and bestselling books, such as The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning and Managers Not MBAs. In this new book Mintzberg provides the most comprehensive, most authoritative, and most revealing examination of managing yet written. He updates his pathbreaking and influential findings in The Nature of Managerial Work, comprehensively analyzes research on managing over th What are the essential characteristics, choices and conundrums of managing? What is the right balance between the art, craft and science of managing? And what is the impact of too much of each? The author sets out to answer these questions and a whole lot more Reveals how FedEx was conceived, launched, and kept afloat despite incredible obstacles