Financial Times
8 total works
"Managers Not MBAs throws a stone into the often complacent world of management education. It should be required reading for anyone who has the qualification, who wants one, or just wanders what all the fuss is about."
The Economist
"Managers not MBAs goes beyond polemic. The book is also a rousing manifesto for the thoroughgoing reform of management education and how we think about it." Michael Skapinker, Managment Editor, Financial Times
Fast Company
called Henry Mintzberg "one of the most original minds in management."
The Financial Times website ranked him the 7th top management thinker in the world.
Tom Peters named his book The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning "my favorite management book in the last 25 years... no contest."
Now, in this sweeping critique of how managers are educated and how, as a consequence, management is practiced, Henry Mintzberg offers thoughtful and controversial ideas for reforming both.
"The MBA trains the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences." Mintzberg writes. "Using the classroom to help develop people already practicing management is a fine idea, but pretending to create managers out of people who have never managed is a sham."
Because conventional MBA programs are designed for people without managerial experience, they overemphasize analysis and denigrate experience. That leaves a distorted impression of management, which has had a corrupting influence on its practice.
Leaders cannot be created in a classroom. They arise in context. But people who already practice management can significantly improve their effectiveness given the opportunity to learn thoughtfully from their own experience.
Mintzberg calls for a more engaging approach to managing and a more reflective approach to management education. He also outlines how business schools can become true schools of management.
"This book offers profound thoughts on management education and development. It should be recommended reading for MBA students and faculties. It will excite and exasperate readers, but it will never bore them." Management Today
"Henry Mintzberg is that rare thing, a humane business school academic. For three decades he has been debunking some of the most corrosive myths about management, and doing so in a style that is both sophisticated and uplifting.
This important book fundamentally challenges many of today's orthodoxies about how businesses should be run. He might just be able to save us all from ourselves." Accounting & Business Magazine
This book slims down his award-winning work Managing (2009) and provides streamlined advice to help new and experienced managers get it right.
Simply Managing answers questions including:
How do I deal with the pressures of management? What are the most important elements of my job? And how do I get them right? How do I connect in a job that's intrinsically disconnected? How do I maintain confidence without becoming arrogant? What are the cornerstones of effective management?
It provides thoughtful, yet practical advice from one of the world's most influential management thinkers.
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.
Management? It's not what you think!
by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand, and Joseph B Lampel
"Henry Mintzberg's views are a breath of fresh air which can only encourage the good guys." The Observer
Tied up in knots by KPIs? Confused by core competencies? Management doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, it shouldn’t be!
One of today’ best-known and most controversial thinkers on management has joined forces with other leading business figures to provide a thought-provoking mix of writing on management. The cutting edge views depicted in this book are controversially the opposite of what is often held up as the truth in management.
Management? Its Not What you Think! brings readers an unusual mix of perspectives to help stimulate more creative management thinking and more enjoyable, challenging and more productive ways to lead their teams. This is a book readers can dip into, a book they can savour, a book that won’t fail to get them reflecting on what management really is…
