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This week is the 20th anniversary of the 1st text. As a middle aged person I have mixed feeling about this. I can’t decide if it’s got worst or maybe better. This week I got messages by text, email, Twitter, Facebook, voice mail, phone, cell phone, in person and a fax! The fax brought back some fond memories – it’s been a while.
To mark the journal’s 90th anniversary, the Harvard Business Review website has run a series of blogs and articles under the strapline “Why Management Matters”. Alas, the content does not engage with the proposition itself, taking the importance of management for granted.
It seems every Business School professor starts by saying how much the world has changed” – that was Henry Mintzberg’s opening to a session on change, not unsurprisingly Henry takes a different tack. He points out that continuity is as important as change. We are co-teaching strategy to a group of Chinese executives today, and I had to sheepishly admit I had done just that earlier in the day!
-Article by Karl Moore
Author: Henry Mintzberg
Abstract:
Myths impede the effective management of health care, for example that the system is failing (indeed, that is a system), and can be fixed by detached social engineering and heroic leadership, or treating it more like a business. This field needs to reframe its management, as distributed beyond the “top”; its strategy as venturing, not planning; its organizing as collaboration beyond control, and especially itself, as a system beyond its parts.
Governments and corporations can't be relied upon to provide solutions to our biggest problems – instead we must look to ourselves that we face serious problems – poverty amid plenty, the degradation of our physical, social, and economic environments, terrorism by fanatic cells and rogue states, and so on – is clear. But how our established institutions – governments and businesses – deal with them, even when responsive and responsible, is not. We need another way.
-Article by Henry Mintzberg
Prof. Karl Moore speaks with Prof. Henry Mintzberg about a forthcoming electronic pamphlet by Mintzberg on "rebalancing society" with the help of the "plural sector."
Read full transcript: The Globe and Mail, October 9, 2012
Henry Mintzberg is one of the most thoughtful and provocative thinkers in management today. He has a new electronic pamphlet coming out called “Rebalancing Society.” In this interview Henry tells what he thinks is wrong with our economies and what might be the way forward.
-Article by Karl Moore
Read full article: Forbes, October 16, 2012
A study of business managers reports the following findings:
Managers scarcely have time to start on a new task or to sit down before they are interrupted.
Only 12 times in the study did the manager succeed in working undisturbed in his office for at least 23 minutes.
“The brevity of many of the manager’s activities is most surprising…Half of the observed activities were completed in less than nine minutes, and only one tenth took more than an hour.
In Henry Mintzberg’s 1994 landmark book, “The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning,” the author calls for a new method to create effective strategies. He notes that “Strategic planning isn’t strategic thinking. One is analysis, the other is synthesis.”
These days, when Jesper Hornberg goes to work he's likely to be stepping into a mud hut in Kenya, checking on a solar lamp. He's the founder of an NGO called Givewatts, which is trying to reduce dependence on kerosene lamps. Rather than having to work in the poor light given off by kerosene, children whose families have his lamps can now see well enough to do their homework. In some cases, their school test scores have increased by 50%.