Henry Mintzberg - - Round One

Henry Mintzberg is Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal. Mintzberg, like several other management theories, has a degree in engineering. He has a mechanical engineering degree from McGill University (Michael Porter of strategy fame has an engineering degree in aeronautical engineering and Tom Peters of excellence fame has both a BS and MS in civil engineering).

His Managing (2009) is a great book - - some of the highlights are below:

• Leadership cannot simply delegate management; instead of distinguishing managers from leaders, we should be seeing managers as leaders, and leadership as management practiced well.
• The more we obsess about leadership, the less of it we seem to get.
• The manager has to help bring out the best in other people, so that they can know better, decide better, and act better.
• The fact is that we only notice what is changing. And most things are not.
• The manager must be prepared to shift moods quickly and frequently.
• No matter what they are doing, managers are plagued by what they might do and what they must do.
• Managers like action - - activities that move, change, are tangible, current, nonroutine.
• Gossip, hearsay, and speculation form a good part of the manager's information diet.
• The effective managers seem to be not those with the greatest degrees of freedom but the ones who use to advantage whatever degrees of freedom they can find.
• Like conventional mail, e-mail is restricted by the poverty of words.
• The Internet may be enhancing networks while weakening communities, within organizations was well as across them.
• E-mail increases the pace and pressure of managing, and likely the interruptions as well.