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Article 3
The Manager’s Job:
Folklore and Fact
The classical view says that the manager organizes, coordinates, plans, and controls; the facts suggest otherwise.
Henry Mintzberg question: What do managers do? Without a proper answer, how can we teach management? How can we design planning or information systems for managers? How can we improve the practice of management at all?
Henry Mintzberg is the Bronfman Professor of Management at McGill University. His latest book is Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange
World of Organizations (Free Press, 1989). This article appeared originally in HBR July–August 1975. It won the McKinsey Award for excellence.
Our ignorance of the nature of managerial work shows up in various ways in the modern organization—in boasts by successful managers who never spent a single day in a management training program; in the turnover of corporate planners who never quite understood what it was the manager wanted; in the computer consoles gathering dust in the back room because the managers never used the fancy on-line MIS some analyst thought they needed. Perhaps most important, our ignorance shows up in the inability of our large public organizations to come to grips with some of their most serious policy problems.
I
f you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organize, coordinate, and control. Then watch what they do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate what you see to these words.
When a manager is told that a factory has just burned down and then advises the caller to see whether temporary arrangements can be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is that manager planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? How about when he or she presents a gold watch to a retiring employee? Or attends a conference to meet people in the trade and returns with an interesting new product idea for employees to consider?
Somehow, in the rush to
The Manager’s Job:
Folklore and Fact
The classical view says that the manager organizes, coordinates, plans, and controls; the facts suggest otherwise.
Henry Mintzberg question: What do managers do? Without a proper answer, how can we teach management? How can we design planning or information systems for managers? How can we improve the practice of management at all?
Henry Mintzberg is the Bronfman Professor of Management at McGill University. His latest book is Mintzberg on Management: Inside Our Strange
World of Organizations (Free Press, 1989). This article appeared originally in HBR July–August 1975. It won the McKinsey Award for excellence.
Our ignorance of the nature of managerial work shows up in various ways in the modern organization—in boasts by successful managers who never spent a single day in a management training program; in the turnover of corporate planners who never quite understood what it was the manager wanted; in the computer consoles gathering dust in the back room because the managers never used the fancy on-line MIS some analyst thought they needed. Perhaps most important, our ignorance shows up in the inability of our large public organizations to come to grips with some of their most serious policy problems.
I
f you ask managers what they do, they will most likely tell you that they plan, organize, coordinate, and control. Then watch what they do. Don’t be surprised if you can’t relate what you see to these words.
When a manager is told that a factory has just burned down and then advises the caller to see whether temporary arrangements can be made to supply customers through a foreign subsidiary, is that manager planning, organizing, coordinating, or controlling? How about when he or she presents a gold watch to a retiring employee? Or attends a conference to meet people in the trade and returns with an interesting new product idea for employees to consider?
Somehow, in the rush to
References: 1. All the data from my study can be found in Henry Mintzberg, The Nature of Managerial Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). Reprinted with permission from Harvard Business Review, March/April 1990, pp. 163–176. © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved. 20