The Best Leadership Is Good Management by Henry Mintzberg
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How did this happen? It became fashionable some years ago to separate “leaders” from “managers”—you know, distinguishing those who “do the right things” from those who “do things right.” It sounds good. But think about how this separation works in practice. U.S. businesses now have too many leaders who are detached from the messy process of managing. So they don’t know what’s going on.
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We’re overled and undermanaged. As someone who teaches, writes, and advises about management, I hear stories about this every day: about CEOs who don’t manage so much as deem—pronouncing performance targets, for instance, that are supposed to be met by whoever is doing the real managing.
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Instead of distinguishing leaders from managers, we should encourage all managers to be leaders. And we should define “leadership” as management practiced well.
Very well said. I have never been comfortable with the attempts to separate leadership from managing. Normally the tone is that leadership is what matters and managing is just then carrying out what leaders have determined and allowed.
I understand why we focus some areas of management as in the area of leadership: it is hard to understand the whole all at once. We can make sense of things more easily by breaking them down (analysis) and speaking of aspects as within the realm of leadership is part of this. We can discuss certain traits as leadership-related. And we can discuss the difference between leadership and power based on position: so leaders within an organization separate from those with authority shown on the organizational chart. But I do not see management and leadership as separate things.
Books by Henry Mintzberg: Managing (2009) – Managers Not MBAs – The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning
Related: Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership – Seven Leadership Leverage Points – If Your Staff Doesn’t Bring You Problems That is a Bad Sign – Management Improvement Leaders
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Classic Management Theories Are Still Relevant
Posted on June 7, 2010 Comments (5)
Good management is good management: it doesn’t matter if someone figured out the good idea 100 years ago or last week.
Are “Classic” Management Theories Still Relevant?
There are way too many people in our field that are not true professionals – they don’t do their homework, and rely too much on their own personal experience. They’re the ones who tend to jump from one fad to the next, enthusiastically promoting each one with an almost religious passion.
However, there’s also a danger of not keeping up with the times and sticking with models or skills that really have outlived their usefulness. At best, you run the risk of coming across as a dinosaur when you explain a management model that was developed in the 1920′s to a group of Millennials. Even worse, you may be relying on models that really don’t apply in today’s world.
Classic management ideas are definitely very valuable today. It is amazing how little use of long known good leadership lessons actually takes place in organizations. You don’t need to discover secrets to improve, just adopt ideas others ignore since they are not new (or whatever justification they use for ignoring them).
One of the main things I have been trying to do with my web sites is to get people to use the already well documented successful management practices.
Bad management ideas are bad: Regardless if they were good ideas 40 years ago, or not. I find bad management practices most often never were good practices so worrying about outdated good practices is not something that merits much time. Just avoid bad practices, don’t worry about when the practices were adopted.
As Dan McCarthy says in his post: “Read and respect the classics and keep up with the latest.”
And if you have to focus on one, focus on the classics. Most of what is new isn’t worthwhile so you will likely spend a lot of time reading about fads that die before you can even try to adopt the ideas into your organizational system. There are good new ideas – read Clayton Christensen, for some good new ideas (even many of those are nearly 10 years old now). Agile software development is another area where good tactics seem new. Mainly agile management offers good ideas on tactics for applying lots of good management ideas (often these ideas are not new), it seems to me.
Related: New or Different? Just Choose Better – Management Advice Failures – New Management Truths Sometimes Started as Heresies – Not New Rules for Management
Categories: Deming, Management, quote, Systems thinking
Tags: commentary, management, management experts, management history, Systems thinking, tips