79 Quotes by Henry Mintzberg

The great myth is the manager as orchestra conductor. It's this idea of standing on a pedestal and you wave your baton and accounting comes in, and you wave it somewhere else and marketing chimes in with accounting, and they all sound very glorious. But management is more like orchestra conducting during rehearsals, when everything is going wrong.

A leader has to be one of two things: he either has to be a brilliant visionary himself, a truly creative strategist, in which case he can do what he likes and get away with it; or else he has to be a true empowerer who can bring out the best in others.

An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of "human resources".

When the world is predictable you need smart people. When the world is unpredictable you need adaptable people.

Strategy is not the consequence of planning, but the opposite: its starting point.

Leadership, like swimming, cannot be learned by reading about it.

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet.

Strategy is a pattern in a stream of decisions.

An enterprise is a community of human beings, not a collection of “human resources”.