Most contemporary management books from scholars tend to center on a central “secret of management” upon which an entire philosophy is built. Henry Mintzberg instead flips the idea on its head and observed dozens of managers from various industries in the field. Then he tried to describe what they were doing empirically. Then he made that into a framework. In this bottom-up approach, he observed managers doing all sorts of things throughout a day, without any seeming center.
This observation is comforting for those of us who seem to lack a center in our management jobs. Sure, as we bounce around from task to task, we try to bring in a cohesiveness to our tasks to make some progress for our institutions. But normally, no central motif dominates our thought – no grand strategy from on high lights our path. Mintzberg tells us that’s ok.
Instead, we have foci across many aspects of the job. And though we’ll always have strengths, we need to find a way to do them all in some measure. He shows how to do that while avoiding common pitfalls. He teaches us the paradoxes that shape managers’ lives and gives us the courage to “reconcile” them without “resolving” them. He also shows us how to manage with our personalities… all the while not letting those personalities get in the way of the work.
To Mintzberg, we don’t need to be a superhero to be a manager. We can be average. We just have to improve ourselves continually, and our teams, and our institutions. That’s good news to those of us who feel we don’t get things right all the time. This book can be a bit high-level and abstract at times, avoiding the necessary detail to bring concepts to life; in some ways, I wish I would have read the original study Managing instead of this more concise version. Still, I like his more natural, more human approach to managing as presented here.
Simply Managing: What Managers Do- and Can Do Better
By Henry Mintzberg
Copyright (c) 2013
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN13 9781609949235
Page Count: 202
Genre: Business/Management
www.amazon.com