Henry Mintzberg - - Round Two

Round Two from Managing (2009):

• The Internet may be driving management practice over the edge, making it so frenetic that it has become dysfunctional: too superficial, too disconnected, too conformist.
• Managing is not one of these things it is all of them: it is controlling and doing and dealing and thinking and leading and deciding and more, not added up but blended together.
• A good part of the work of managing involves doing what specialists do, but it particular ways that make use of the manager's special contacts, status, and information.
• Managers frame their work by making particular decisions, focusing on particular issues, developing particular strategies, and so forth, to establish the context for everyone else working in the unit.
• Watch any manager and one thing readily becomes apparent: the amount of time that is spent simply communicating - - namely, collecting and disseminating information for its own sake, without necessarily processing it.
• Treating employees as "human resources" means to deal with them as if they are information, not people: they get reduced to a narrow dimension of their whole selves.
• To manage with people, instead of through information, is to move one step closer to action but still to remain removed from it.
• The job of development is perhaps best seen as managers helping people to develop themselves.
• The culture of an organization may be rather difficult to establish, and to change - - that can take years, if ever -- but it can be rather easy to destroy, given a neglectful management.