Mintzberg On Management

Steve Denning
Senior Contributor

Leadership Strategy

“There are two people, and only two,” writes Professor Karl Moore professor at
the Desautels Faculty, McGill University in Montreal in Forbes, “whose ideas
must be taught to every MBA in the world: Michael Porter and Henry
Mintzberg… You can contrast their two views as Porter’s taking a more
deliberate strategy approach while Mintzberg’s emphasize emergent strategy…
Porter’s ideas are still relevant.. But they are getting a bit long in the tooth for
today’s different world. Henry’s emergent strategy ideas simply seem to be
more relevant to the world we live in today.”

In the Special Issue of the journal, Strategy & Leadership, on Outracing

Change: Learning to Foresee, Adapt, Re-Invent and Innovate Faster (2011,
Vol 39, No. 2), Mintzberg speaks with S&L founder Robert Allio about
management, leadership, innovation and emergent strategy. Here are some
excerpts from the conversation:

Mintzberg is crystal clear on the mythical distinction between leadership and

management:

Mintzberg: The notion that one can be a leader and not a manager, originally
postulated by Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik, is wrong.
An executive cannot lead without managing. If they're not coupled, the
organization becomes dysfunctional....

S&L: What do you see as the utility of formal strategic planning, as compared
with an opportunistic approach, the emergent strategy model?

Mintzberg: I prefer a learning approach, as compared to a planning

approach, to strategy. You cannot formalize the process of creating strategy –
you can only formalize the implementation of strategy through budgets,
programs, and so forth.

Take the case of IKEA – the enormously successful Swedish furniture

company. Their business model comprised two critical elements: offer
furniture unassembled, and give customers access to the warehouse...
S&L: IKEA has certainly excelled. Do we know the genesis of their strategy?

Mintzberg: Yes. One of the workers, frustrated in trying to get a table in his
car decided to take the legs off. Insight number one – all customers have the
same challenge. And IKEA began selling unassembled merchandize. Insight
number two: when a large new store in Stockholm became inundated with
customers, staff began to allow customers to retrieve product from the
warehouse – the go get-the-stuff-yourself model. Opportunism? I call it
learning....

S&L: What's the metric for the effectiveness of your approach?

Mintzberg: One can't measure learning, so the bottom line is impossible to

quantify. As a result, we use surrogate measures, such as repeat business.
Customer loyalty is very high...

S&L: So businesses need a culture that enables that kind of behavior, one
based on collaboration and communication. In the well-managed corporation,
who's responsible for this learning process? Doesn't the CEO have a role in all
of this?

Mintzberg: Everyone is responsible. Everyone is learning at all levels, and

management is listening. Middle managers are important, although they do
need the support of senior management. The problem with the concept of
leadership is that it implies everyone else is a follower. But we don't need more
followers. We need a world of community-ship in which employees have a
sense of belonging, and a willingness to work hard for it...

S&L: What overall advice can you offer executives managing in today's
turbulent environment?

Mintzberg: The current crisis is not simply a banking or financial sector

crisis, it is a management crisis. America's legendary sense of enterprise –
embodied in the energy and resourcefulness of its people, has been the key to
its economic miracle. The dismal state to which the American economy has
now fallen can be attributed significantly to the steady deterioration of many
of its large enterprises, which has undermined the country's very sense of
enterprise. Publicly-traded corporations are dreadfully badly managed.

Paul Krugman, the economic columnist for the New York Timesand other
editorializers keep calling for economic solutions – but it's not an economic
problem, it's a management problem that cannot be fixed with modifications
to fiscal and monetary policy. But no one wants to hear that message...

Get the full article here.

The issue of Strategy & Leadership also includes my own article, The
Reinvention of Management (2011, Vol. 39 Issue: #2, pp.9 – 17) which
shows how management is being reinvented with five fundamental shifts:

 the firm’s goal (a shift from inside-out to outside-in);

 the role of managers (a shift from controller to enabler);
 the mode of coordination (from command and control to dynamic
linking);
 the values practiced (a shift from value to values); and
 the communications (a shift from command to conversation).