Karl Moore: This is Karl Moore, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to be speaking to my colleague Henry Mintzberg of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University. Good afternoon, Henry.
Henry Mintzberg: Good afternoon, Karl.
KM: Henry, you recently had a book come out, and it's simply called Managing . And, in some ways, it summarizes your thinking about a subject you've studied for three to four decades now. What is the book Managing about, anyway?
HM: It's actually about managing. If I was going to use a subtitle, which I decided we wouldn't, it would be: Pure, if not simple . It's about managing pure, just managing, period. And it's not simple. Managing is not simple. I don't mean the book's not simple. But, obviously, if managing is not simple, then the book can't be that simple. But it's basically about the essence of managing. And it revisits my first book, which was published in 1973, to be exact - so, it's been many decades - which was called The Nature of Managerial Work . I wrote the book so I can find out if I learned anything or not, all these years. And I'll let the reader decide that.
So the first chapter is called Managing Ahead, which is kind of introducing the idea of management as a practice. It's more art and craft than it is science. And it introduces the 29 people who I spend a day observing as kind of examples and stories that are throughout the book - from a refugee camp, from a symphony orchestra conductor, all kinds of people that are everything you can imagine.
And the next chapter's called The Dynamics of Managing. That's much like my earlier book, in the sense that it's about the harassment, the action orientations, the interruptions, the pressures of managing. [It's]much like that book, except a new section on the Internet concludes that the Internet is not changing management fundamentally - e-mail is really what we're talking about - e-mail doesn't change managing fundamentally so much as aggravate all these conditions and, as a result, drive a lot of this managing over the edge, where it just becomes too frenetic, and too harassed. So, people are calling meetings at 10:30 p.m. Sunday evening for 8:30 Monday morning, as if everyone's got their BlackBerry on all the time. That's Chapter 2.
KM: Is that a call to do away with e-mail?
HM: No, no, I don't think we'll do away with e-mail. But we can do away with all this frenetic-ness, for sure. Sorry, we can't do away with all this frenetic-ness, but we certainly don't have to take it as far as it's gone.
KM: What has changed about management in the last 30 years or so that you have been studying it?
HM: Nothing.
KM: So, management's the same as 30 years ago, more or less.
HM: No, 100 years ago. What I mean by that is that management's a practice. It's not like medicine, when new techniques come along. There are new flavours of the month every month, but they don't make that much difference, ultimately.
Managing is a fundamental human activity. That's my point. It's not some kind of scientific activity that evolves over time. I think management is basic and fundamental. So, the next chapter, the third chapter, talks about a model of managing. And it basically says, you know, managers act on three plains of activity. They act through information. They work through people. And they manage action directly. And that's always been the case.
And there are different ways of doing that. And then, when you look in the next chapter, which is called The Untold Varieties of Managing, and you look at the varieties among these 29 managers, just in general, you conclude that there's such a range of practice that it's not a question of what's right or what's wrong.
And a lot of myths fall down when you start to look at what managers do. For example, everybody agrees that senior managers take the long-term perspective, and junior or less-senior managers take a short-term perspective.
Well, why was Norman Inkster - the Superintendent of the RCMP - why was he spending a meeting in the morning with his staff looking at clips from last night's television news, to head off any embarrassing questions in Parliament that day? Is that a long-term perspective? Now, nobody would criticize Inkster for doing that. Is that a long-term perspective? Okay, let's go to Gord Irwin, who is running the front country, so-called, of Banff National Park. A good part of his day was worrying about the expansion of a parking lot that was causing a lot of grief among environmentalists about the movement of animals. Was that a short-term perspective? So, you've got a guy at the bottom of this so-called silly hierarchy taking an extremely long-term view of impact on the environment; and the top of a rather big hierarchy worrying about what's happening in Question Period in a few hours. So all these myths kind of fall by the wayside.
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