Managing

Book excerpt: A half century ago Peter Drucker put management on the map. Leadership has since pushed it off. Henry Mintzberg aims to restore management to its proper place: front and center. “We should be seeing managers as leaders.” Mintzberg writes, “and leadership as management practiced well.” This landmark book draws on Mintzberg's observations of twenty-nine managers, in business, government, health care, and the social sector, working in settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw—the pressures, the action, the nuances, the blending—compelled him to describe managing as a practice, not a science or a profession, learned primarily through experience and rooted in context. But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture and level in hierarchy, even personal style, turn out to have less influence than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg looks at how to deal with some of the inescapable conundrums of managing, such as, How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get things done? How can you manage it when you can't reliably measure it? This book is vintage Mintzberg: iconoclastic, irreverent, carefully researched, myth-breaking. Managing may be the most revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can do it better.