Category: Management

 

 

Mintzberg: Who Will Fix the US Economy?

The place to start is America’s executive suites, which should be cleared of mercenaries in order to encourage real leadership. That is the easy part: get rid of the obscene compensation packages and watch the mercenaries disappear. People who care about building and sustaining decent enterprises – and who understand that doing so is a team exercise ­– can then take over. (…)

Public support should be shifted from protecting large established corporations to encouraging the growth of newer enterprises. And startups should be discouraged from rushing into the embrace of the stock market’s short-sighted analysts and many an established corporation should be encouraged to escape that embrace. At the same time, regulation and taxation should be used to rein in disruptive day trading and other exploitative speculation that crowds out sustainable investment and disrupts regular business activities.

Above all, what the American economy needs now are managers who know and care about their businesses. Armies of MBAs who have been trained to manage everything in general but nothing in particular are part of the problem, not the solution.

via Project Syndicate.

 

The difference between management theorists and philosophers

via The Management Myth

As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins.

  • The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know.
  • The second is money.

In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Mind your metaphors: We’re a team, not a family

Our staff would say: “We’re a family. We’re a family.” And I’ve actually said directly to everyone in all-staff meetings: “We’re not a family, because in a family you never can fire somebody like your Uncle Joe. You just can’t. You have to put up with him because he’s family. In an organization, if someone is taking the organization down, we can’t accept that because the organization is bigger than any one of us.”

So I’ve said to them that the analogy that best suits us is, “We’re a team,” and in a team, everybody’s got a role to play. And the team wins when everybody plays their roles to their best ability. The other thing that’s different in a team is that people understand the concept of roles. So if you’re the manager, you have a job to do as a manager. No one, generally speaking, resents the fact that you have authority because they understand that it comes with the role of a manager and that teams need managers. They don’t manage themselves.

But in a family, it is about power. You know, Mom or Dad has the power, and I think the dynamic that often plays out in a workplace is that people project all of their parental stuff. And I remember a job where I actually had to say to my team: “I am not your mother. I’m the division director here. I have a job to do. You have a job to do.”

via NYTimes.com.

 

Mintzberg’s “Managing” is Britain’s best management book

Every year Britain’s Chartered Management Institute awards a Management Book of the Year and this year’s choice is Managing by McGill University‘s Henry Mintzberg.

Following the announcement Mintzberg said “I would be honoured by this lovely prize in any event. But it has special meaning for me because, of all the places I go in this world, none matches the U.K. for intellectual stimulation. The Brits combine curiosity and empathy with wonderful individuality, by which I mean, not acting for oneself, but thinking for oneself. So to be honoured in this way in the U.K. is especially delightful.

 

 

Le metteur en scène en tant que traducteur

On a l’impression en France qu’en lisant un bouquin de Tolstoï ou Dickens, on lit Tolstoï ou Dickens : mais c’est stupide ! Pour lire Dickens il faut lire l’anglais ! Si vous écoutez une œuvre musicale ou si vous allez au théâtre voir Hamlet, ce que vous regardez ce n’est pas Hamlet, vous le savez bien ! Vous regardez Hamlet vu par un metteur en scène.

Aussi le traducteur en tant que sujet situe (ou “met en scene”)  le texte original dans une autre langue:

Tout ce que je dis, c’est que par nature, la traduction est une interprétation. Il ne peut pas y avoir de traduction objective, parce que c’est quelqu’un qui fait une traduction. Quand je dis “par nature” ça veut dire que ce n’est ni bien ni mal, c’est un fait de l’ordre de l’existant. Alors que faut-il demander à une traduction ? Ce n’est pas qu’elle soit fidèle, mais qu’elle soit cohérente, c’est-à-dire qu’elle soit une lecture, et une lecture appliquée. Une lecture pratique.

via L’Oeil électrique.

Mintzberg’s latest on managing

Wisdom (and book promotion) from Mintzberg via WSJ:

Basically, managing is about influencing action. Managing is about helping organizations and units to get things done, which means action.

One step removed, [managers] manage people. Managers deal with people who take the action.

And two steps removed from that, managers manage information to drive people to take action—through budgets and objectives and delegating tasks and designing organization structure and all those sorts of things.

Today I think we have much too much managing through information—what I call “deeming.” People sit in their offices and think they’re very clever because they deem that you will increase sales by 10%, or out the door you go. Well, I can do that. My granddaughter could do that; she’s four. It doesn’t take genius to say: Increase sales or out you go.

Happiness is overrated

[It]  is a function of our expectations — or, as it has been said: “Happiness equals reality minus expectations.”

Given that neat formulation, there are two ways to attack the problem: boost our reality or lower our expectations.

Most of us choose the former. We’d rather stew in our misery than trim our expectations.

Lowering our sights smacks us as a cop out, un-American. Better a nation of morose overachievers, we reason, than a land of happy slackers. (via Lowered Expectations)

Evidence-Based Management

Five Principles of EBM:

1. Face the hard facts, and build a culture in which people are encouraged to tell the truth, even if it is unpleasant

2. Be committed to “fact based” decision making — which means being committed to getting the best evidence and using it to guide actions

3. Treat your organization as an unfinished prototype — encourage experimentation and learning by doing

4. Look for the risks and drawbacks in what people recommend — even the best medicine has side effects

5. Avoid basing decisions on untested but strongly held beliefs, what you have done in the past, or on uncritical “benchmarking” of what winners do